Punch In-Out
Don D
9,834 Posts
Those of you who have time clocks for hourly employees; what is your practice regarding the window of time during which they are allowed to clock in either side of start time and not be penalized? Do you allow them to punch in early to keep from having everybody standing at the clock at start time? In this case, no doubt, at the end of the week, the card shows overtime. How do you handle that, knowing you allowed the early punch but also knowing they were not working? We need to clean this up a bit.
Comments
says that work was done - we pay them starting at 7.30 am. And yes, in the afternoon, the guys hang around the timeclocks for five minutes , doing no work, until quitting time at 4 pm- we DO pay them until 4 pm. If a guy clocks in AFTER 4 pm, unless a supervisor says work was done - we pay them until 4 pm.
Good Luck!
I experienced this very same thing years ago, where ee's punched in up to 1 hr early and socialized while waiting for their starting time. A complaint was filed and DOL ruled that the employer's willingness to permit the "punching-in" was more likely than not permitting the employee to work......... We had to change our practice and enforce the punch-in/punch-out requirements. We were very close to being charged with a willful violation (becuz we permitted the practice to continue for so long), so that practice became history. Good luck with your awkward situation.
Once the employee finds out that clocking in early or out late results in disciplinary action up to the point where they could be terminated they change their ways very quickly.
I totally agree with Down the Middle. If a wage claim is filed, the DOL will assume that the punch in time means that is when work began. Unless you can prove to them that people weren't working, you are now on the hook for all those extra hours. Trying to prove this a year later to a DOL auditor is almost impossible. We don't allow people to punch more than 10 minutes prior to shift.
For lunch, employees go at a variety of times, and they have 30 minutes. So, if they take 23-37 they are charged 1/2 hour. If they take 22, we only dock them 1/4 hour; and if they take 38, we dock them 3/4 hour.
All overtime must be pre-authorized. Therefore, if someone clocks in too early or too late, they are written up for un-authorized overtime, but they still get paid.
Yes, DOL interviews ees. The issue: disgruntled former ees do not always tell the truth...or they get amnesia...suddenly, they remember working every morning without pay....in fact, they pull out calendars with copious notes of all the projects they supposedly were working on during that first hour over coffee.....you would fall out of your chair to read it.
Active ees may also fall into the amenesia trap when they suddenly realize it could mean a huge back pay check for them. Most ees are good and honest. But there are a lot of ees that bend the truth when it benefits them for a potential payout mandated by DOL. The "hey, it's free money and so-and-so is getting it" seems to promote a lot of inaccurate interviews. The problem: the DOL assumes the ee is right and you have nothing to refute their claims.
I used to represent many employers in wage and hour matters. If you think this can't happen to you, you are sadly mistaken. My best advice to all of you: don't ever allow ees to clock in so early. It serves no purpose and creates the ultimate proof against you that they were indeed working.
Yes, the DOL takes the word of the employee.....and a time card will support that claim. Yes, they did interview our employees.
We pay our employees for all time on the clock. We have told employees if they come to work early that they can visit in the staff lounge.....not sit at their desks. We only allow them to clock in a few minutes before 8 am. And, yes, our employees will stand by the clock waiting for it to change to 5 pm...I guess human nature.
I believe if "prep time" is needed to do the job that it is considered on the clock.
I'm assuming these employees leave at 3:45?
In addition we applied the seven-minute rule as well so if an employee punched in five minutes after the start of the shift, they were paid from the beginning of the shift but if they punched in 10 minutes late, it went to the next quarter of an hour. This was also true at the end of the shift - if an employee punched out five minutes late they were paid only until the end of the shift but if an employee punched out eight minutes late the supervisor was contacted. The employee received the OT pay regardless of whether they were working or not at the end of the shift but if the supervisor informed us they were NOT working, the employee was talked to and a copy of their timecard was kept. Continual late punches without working as handled as a disciplinary issue.
We were not audited by the DOL during my tenure at this company but we never had any employee complaints.