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Comment by paradox242 | Hacker News Reader

> We had to be in Avail status at the exact start of our shift or be counted late. For example, if I was scheduled to be in at 10am, I had to be in Avail at 10am. Meaning I had to take care of booting up computer, etc. before then.

I won over 2k from a class-action lawsuit over this exact thing about a decade ago. This is not legal.

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Legal or not, this is not the way a human should treat another. I suppose this is what happens when the one and only goal is profit - Amazon delivery drivers peeing in bottles in their trucks comes to mind ...

(Amazon employee but not doing anything related to deliveries)

UPS drivers pee in bottles while out delivering, too.

In another life I worked facilities at a UPS distribution center and my team would have to pick up those bottles :-/

When yah gotta go, yah gotta go.

Is it possible that they did this because there's just no easy access to restrooms like being stuck in traffic?

I have friends who have done this when they were stuck in traffic.

I imagine that when UPS drivers do their deliveries like in the suburbs, there might not be public restrooms nearby.

Logical explanation!

In reality, like always, it's a mix of both - meeting delivery deadlines, and meeting nature-call deadlines.

I 100% agree on the "this is not how humans treat humans". This sort of thing is what comes up when you can only be measured by numbers. And someone four levels above you says the numbers need to improve by 2%. At that point you ar a number, or at least they are treating you as your output, not as a human.

> they are treating you as your output, not as a human.

In the context of an employer monitoring employee toilet breaks, this is perversely amusing.

Higher ups might not even see that number, they see avail time divided by paid time, and they want to push "efficiency" up.

What's not legal? Requiring that a worker be at their desk at a certain time? Doubt it. Now if they're not getting paid for the time when they're setting up, I agree that's probably not legal.

"Scheduled to be in at 10am" implies "paid from 10am" to me.

True, but that also means that you should not expect an employee to be productive immediately at 10am. "Paid from 10am" means that the expectation is to be walking in the door at 10am, on average. If you want the employee to be set up by 10am, that costs extra.

Yes that's the issue, if your shift starts at 10am it means you start working at 10am, and setup is part of your work.

> According to the regulations interpreting the FLSA, “a stenographer who reads a book while waiting for dictation, a messenger who works a crossword puzzle while awaiting assignments, [a] fireman who plays checkers while waiting for alarms and a factory worker who talks to his fellow employees while waiting for machinery to be repaired are all working during their periods of inactivity.” Since these employees are unable to effectively use the time spent waiting for their own purposes, the time essentially belongs to and is controlled by the employer. Accordingly, in all of these examples, the time spent waiting is an integral part of the job. As such, the employees are engaged to wait, and are therefore entitled to be compensated for their time.

https://www.thehumanequation.com/en/news_rss/articles/2010/w...

How about compiling software? https://xkcd.com/303/

I don't know if that is still true

https://slate.com/business/2014/12/supreme-court-rules-again...

I think this is maybe the most egregious instance of this, can’t imagine how this case was decided the wrong way.

You are your desk at the start time. But if you need to turn on your computer, log in the the system, start things...

Even more than that, the clock starts when you walk through the front door (portal to portal). If the travel time to the actual work site is long, such as a very large campus, or a miner's trip from the mine entrance to the active dig site, then that is time that should be on the clock.

> What's not legal?

If nothing else, I think the part where you are expected to start working before you start getting paid sounds pretty sketchy.

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