I am a full time hourly employee working for a national oxygen supply company. In addition to my regular hours, I often work overtime, and am paid appropriately for that.(I average 60 hours per week). I am a driver, though I'm considered a "customer service representative". On top of regular and overtime hours, I am required to be on call one evening a week, from 5 pm until 8 am the next morning, plus one weekend per month which begins on a friday at 5 pm until the following monday morning at 8 am. My employer does not pay me for any on call time unless I actually go out on a service call. Many times when I'm on call I receive many phone calls, that I answer and can handle without doing a service call. I am not paid in any way for this time. Also I must stay within 25 miles of our office while I am on call so I can respond to service calls. Should I be getting paid for my on call time? I live and work in Colorado.
Thank you for your question today, I look forward to assisting you. I bring nearly 20 years of legal experience in various disciplines.For you to legally be paid for the on call time, your employer would have to control your movement much more. You'd have to essentially be required to be in a certain building or to be within 5 minutes of the workplace at all times. So, the employer doesn't have to pay you for the basic on call time. The employer should, however, be paying you for the calls that you take in relation to the job. If you are talking someone through a situation, answering their questions and working, you should be getting paid for that time. If your employer is not willing to you for it, you then have to answer a tough question. Is it worth it to you to make a complaint to the state Department of Labor for only the time you can compute for those phone calls? Yes, you are technically protected from retaliation for making such a claim, but that is very difficult to enforce long term. Employers have so many undetectable ways to retaliate against someone. If you feel you have a future with the company at all, this may be a battle not worth fighting, particularly given that you are only talking about pay for those times when you deal with a situation on the phone.
Thank you.
No problem. Take care.