Good! Continue to do so. Just rack up your lost wages and your penalties. Then sue them or use DOL when you’re done. Back Pay | U.S. Department of Labor
To the OP—ignore this guy’s advice, obviously. He seems to want to harm you, as far as I can tell.
Obviously you can’t tell anything.
Please do not say the other posters are just wrong.
Use arguments or show their faults. I will evaluate all of your input.
He’s recommending that you “just eat” time that you are legally entitled to be paid for, to get benefits from a company who has already shown they will screw you over when the time comes to compensate you. If they won’t pay you for time worked, what makes you think they’ll agree that you worked “enough” in that 90 days for benefits? There’s a lot of ways to manipulate numbers if they want to, or just never happen to find you any more work once you hit day 89.
I don’t see why you wouldn’t just talk to the agency about this. Their answer will tell you whether they just had a major stupid moment, or if it’s their MO to operate illegally. Either way, you’ll get your compensation either now (if they apologize and rectify it themselves) or later (after reporting them), and as a general rule you don’t want to be burning time working for a company that doesn’t intend to pay you – you have a legal right not to do that. If they’re not honest, find another agency, whether that means keeping your head low while you look for another gig and going after your pay once you’ve left, or quitting and going after the money now.
I just don’t see how “just work for free” could or should be an option here.
Since I realized this issue existed, I’ve been corresponding with them via email.
I have avoided the phone because this is the kind of thing that I want IN WRITING.
They kept misunderstanding my inquiries, and I didn’t get the staffing agency’s direct answer to my actual question until this morning.
Yeah, that really doesn’t make them sound any better. I certainly agree about having it all in writing. Yet given that “You realize it’s illegal not to pay me for that travel time?” is a pretty straightforward question, I wonder if they really misunderstood or ahem “misunderstood.”
I hope their answer puts them in a better light. If not, get outta there man. Do it however you like, but get outta there.
Okay.
Reviewing the staffing agency’s email, I am told that I will be paid for 1/2 of the time I spend in the client’s vehicle traveling from site to site.
That makes this less bad, I suppose.
I’ll ponder what to do about this over the weekend, I suppose.
Our job site for Monday is a shorter distance from headquarters than many people drive to work in the morning, so I’ll put in Monday even if I decide I’m going to quit; might as well make the money on that day.
That’s stupid. You’re entitled to be paid the whole time. In what way does “half pay” make any sense at all?
Before I told them what they were doing was illegal, I simply asked for an explanation of the policy.
I would hate to be rude just because I misunderstood what they said.
Until this morning, I was unclear as to what policy on travel time the staffing agency actually had.
I overheard co-workers discussing the pay policy with non-management direct employees of the client, but I do not choose to rely on second-hand information when dealing with these matters.
The client has not discussed their billing with me directly as of yet.
I have not read every post in this thread. Do we have clarity as to what your state laws require re compensation for travel time? It sounds like the employment agency is just making arbitrary crap up at this point re how they want to pay you.
Federal law seems pretty clear that I need paid for everything between:
- entering front door at headquarters to
- leaving front door at headquarters
- minus lunch break
That makes state law irrelevant to me, as I can’t imagine how it would be more generous.
I don’t think they’re making up arbitrary crap.
It looks like the client made up arbitrary crap 3 years ago, then employed some 1099 contractors on that basis.
Now, the client called up the staffing agency for help, and the staffing agency sent people out.
On the third day, somebody told the staffing agency about the client’s policies, and the agency tried to communicate with us about it.
So, the client made up arbitrary crap and the agency is running with it.
The agency got ambushed with the policy, as far as I can tell, and they went along with it.
I have a sneaking suspicion the agency’s high-level management and lawyers are unaware of this whole development.
That’s a decent compromise at least. It might even be legal to pay a different rate for the driving time, but I don’t know. So now if you keep the job you should stick by the agreement to take 1/2 time for driving. That is if you want to maintain good will with the agency. If these places like someone, they’ll place that person again. But if in the end you don’t even want the job, or to stay with the agency you can call the Labor Dept. and try to get compensation for the whole thing. You mentioned the agency offers benefits after 90 days of work for them, if those benefits are important to you, you should consider staying in their good graces and forget about the loss of a few hours pay. You just have to keep your eyes open for future placements that might have some hidden gotchas.
I reviewed their email again, having reviewed the contents of this thread.
When I asked about being compensated for travel, I saw this:
*You can log your hours for your travel time to the site but not on the way home. You can basically log the hours on the way there but not the way back. So you would log 3 hours total for a 6 hour trip. *
So, basically, it’s the same as “we are paying you half your wage for time you spend in the van” except that it appears to be a work-around for paying overtime.
Well, now it gets interesting. You can be paid at a reduced rate for on-the-job travel time. However, that’s not what’s happening here.
boop boop boop staffing agency employee detected boop boop boop
Refusing to pay for some of your work-related travel time is still illegal. Blindsided or not, it was their responsibility to either explain to the client why they couldn’t do that, or suck it up themselves and pay out of their own pocket. (The client sounds like a piece of work.)
Now that you’ve established, nicely, that their policy is illegal, now is when you point out to them that fact. I’d continue being nice, but not spineless… that is, just state the facts (labor law requires you to pay me for that time, regardless of what your internal policies are, here’s a link so you can familiarize yourself with it), and give them a chance to rectify it themselves. If they refuse, then you’ll know you have to escalate to the Dept. of Labor.
(If they don’t rectify, I don’t think I could resist killing them with kindness. “I’m sorry you feel you can’t change that policy. I’ll have the Department of Labor contact you so you can sort it out with them.” 
)
It seems to me that if all the work is done for the same company, and if the driving part involves carrying around materials that must be picked up from/delivered to other sites of the same company, that you should be paid for all the hours spent in this company vehicle.
Unless they are looking at it like you are just hitching a ride.
The DRIVER of the vehicle is getting paid for it, right? And they don’t stop paying him if he’s sitting around waiting for you to get your part done.
Seems to me that once you clock in on this job, you get paid for every minute you spend on this job. This is your time, which is a big part of what you’re selling. This is time you can’t do anything else with, such as work for someone else. Six hours round-trip is a pretty darn big chunk of the typical 8-hour day.
I see you negotiated to get them to pay half of it. Well, it’s still a sizable chunk, and one you can’t really do anything else with. I would think hard.
Here is a comparison: I once worked as a contract paralegal. A lawyer and I were doing due diligence, which involved driving to companies outside our typical work site. If I drove to the outside company and spent the whole day there, then drove home, I did not get paid for commuting time, even if it was further than the main office. However, if I drove to the main office, and then drove to one company, reviewed contracts until my eyes bled, then drove to another company on the other side of town to do the same–I got paid for the driving time.
I even got overtime. (The lawyer didn’t.)
I’m assuming the OP wants to keep working for the agency. If he refuses the work based on this they may not ever hire him again. Now he knows that they are willing to work something out, so there’s more reason to compromise and stick with them.
The OP is always free to file a complaint and request full pay for an a few hours, possibly gaining himself a little money in the end, and losing all the potential pay he could make from the agency. I’m sure if that suits him, that’s what he’ll do.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, I was never a staffing agency employee. But I was an employment agency owner. That’s why I can look at both sides of the coin, and I do that because that’s what brought the people placed through my company excellent jobs and contracts at high rates and satisfaction in their careers.