At times places I have worked at have tried to limit paying myself and coworkers for travel time.
To these situations I have responded “Can I go to sleep?” “Can I drink a beer?” If the answer is no to either question I am on the clock.
Could I drink a beer or sleep sitting in the airplane? Perhaps. But if I have to drive my car home after touchdown then no, I can’t have that beer so yes I am getting paid.
Certainly we could argue any number of scenarios that could mess up my simplification, but it all comes down to ‘am I doing something that I would choose to do rather than for my employer.’
Whoa - where did anyone say they were paying travel costs?
Traveling on weekends for meetings starting Monday or ending Friday late seems pretty common - though food for Friday night / Saturday morning gets covered, I trust. The weird thing is forcing someone to wait a day at the travel site, after the work is over, to travel on his own time. That is not common.
Then I don’t really understand what the OP’s question is. If your employer is paying for you to stay an extra day then there’s no problem; if he’s not paying anything and dictating travel on your own time that is a problem.
I used to travel a lot as a consultant (~40% or so) and I was always paid for travel and would take comp time when I travelled weekends. My wife, however, travelled much more than me for many yeas as a consultant and she would not charge for travel time. I always disagreed with her about this decision, but it was hers, not mine. She, FTR, has always made much more than me. She is a business consultant and I am a technical consultant FWIW.
Where I work in the Federal government, the prevailing attitude is that business travel is perk that we should be grateful to have, and anyone asking for comp time would be laughed at. With the sequester, work-related travel has pretty much disappeared entirely, so travel on personal time vs. work time is at this point just a theoretical consideration.
It’s a problem if the employer is counting that extra day against your vacation time, when you’re being forced to spend that day in a place you did not choose to travel to for vacation.
I don’t know about you, but I’d hate to give up half my weekend for no reason. I’ve done so plenty of times for meetings on Fridays and Mondays, but that was a reason.
So, Winston Friday isn’t a vacation day, is it? And do you have someplace you have to be there?
Meetings with customers would make it deductible.
Seriously, when I asked the Tax Woman about treating food as a deductible (which many of my colleagues do, until they get hit with an inspection and get all those tickets shoved up their asses), she said that tickets from the burger place wouldn’t be acceptable but “a lobster lunch for six on a weekday” would, so long as I said it was a meeting with clients.
On the OP’s subject, I’ve had a couple of jobs where we were required to travel in our own time. In both cases, it was not general policy (in one of them it was against general policy) but a way for the boss to clang balls - bosses who btw travelled on company time, both times.
Travel time to places other than my normal workplace counts as working hours for me, except if I am travelling directly from home, I am expected to deduct my normal commute time from the total (so I don’t count the first half hour of the outbound journey, or the last half hour of the journey home)
I could have been more clear… I tried to book Tuesday-Friday, but my boss is telling me I have to travel on my own time at least one way, so my trip will either be Sunday-Wednesday or Wednesday-Saturday.
Honestly, I think the OP is being a bit of a baby. Sometimes you have to travel for work on your days off. It’s one time and your going to the UK, not Buttfuck, Iowa.
Honestly, I’ve never worked at a place that micromanaged my travel like that. Usually I’m just told where I’m needed to go and when and I just go there.
That’s not always such a great guideline in my line of work. What about corporate happy hours or client dinners?
Wait now I’m confused. Whatever happens, the company is paying for travel costs, right? And the only issue is when the travel will take place, correct?
I’m having a hard time understanding why it makes a difference whether it’s on “your own time” or not if you’re salaried. Why do they care?
Am I correct in assuming that whatever happens, they’ll be paying for travel costs?
ETA Never mind, I figured it out and I’m a little dumb. Flying one day on “your own time” means you’re in the office for one more day than you would have been.
Yeah, maybe. There have been some other things going on here, and I’m hyper-sensitive about things right now. A new director is micro-managing the crap out of us, generally being a dick and making this a really shitty place to work.
I’d reiterate, though, that I travelled Saturday AND Sunday two weeks ago to go to Shanghai. I didn’t ask, and wasn’t told to travel on the weekend, but it’s a long trip and I wanted to do the right thing.
But to have them tell me now that I must travel on my own time is BS. I’m still trying to determine the correct level of indignation. I’m going back and forth between extreme rage and not caring.
I’m expected to do *some *business travel in my own time - typically take an Monday/Tuesday evening flight there and a Thursday/Friday afternoon flight back.
Does your company have a travel policy or anything about travel written into your employment contract?
What the OP is complaining about is that he’s being ordered to travel on the weekend WHEN IT’S NOT NECESSARY. They’re trying to squeeze an extra day of work out of him by forcing him to use one of his days off as a travel day.