Is it legal for a job to round up when you clocked in and round down when you leave, potentially screwing you out of 1/4 hour? For instance, say you get there at 08:01. That’s one minute later than you’re supposed to get there, so you also leave one minute late at 16:31. With simple subtraction, factoring for a 30 minute lunch, this is 8 hours. But your job rounds the 08:01 up to 08:15 and the 16:31 down to 16:30, making it 7 3/4 hours. You could even work from 08:01 to 16:44 which is 8h13m and still only get paid 7 3/4 hours. I know the law says you have to get paid for whatever you work if you’re on an hourly wage, but is it explicit about this? I doubt anyone has sued for what amounts to a few dollars but just the same, this shouldn’t be allowed.
What happens if you get to work at 7:59 and leave at 16:30? Do the change the starting time to 7:30?
What they did is against the law. They are shorting you time.
No. They always round against you. Starting time is rounded up and ending time is rounded down.
When I do time cards, I round to the nearest 15 minutes. If I’m in doubt, I always round in the employee’s favor. If there’s more than one instance of questionable rounding, I’ll add up the minutes and round from there.
Labor laws are different in every state, but all states have to at least meet the National Labor Board standards. The OP should be able to request to see his/her time card and add the time up themselves. If there is a monetary shortage, they should request a pay adjustment.
Have you googled your state’s labor board to see if this is addressed? I recommend that you track your time independently to see how much you are shorted.
Not that I disagree, but for the sake of thoroughness, can you cite the Texas law being violated?
Now here’s the big question…Do you round each day or each week? When I started doing payroll the employees all mentioned that they were getting more hours. The reason was that I round at the end of the week, +/- 7 minutes. The last person rounded each day +/-35 minutes.
The fundamental rule under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act is that an employee must be paid for actual hours worked. The U.S. Department of Labor has promulgated a regulation regarding time clocks and rounding hours at 29 C.F.R. § 785.48. The rule permits rounding to the nearest fraction of an hour (and it gives as common fractions the nearest five minutes, the nearest tenth of an hour, and the nearest quarter hour). This permission is subject to the proviso that the rule be designed such that the rounding will average out to actual hours worked.
In your case, there are two deviations from the USDOL-mandated standard. Your employer is not rounding to the nearest fraction, and furthermore, they are rounding in such a way that the cumulative effect is to pay you less than actual hours worked. The USDOL’s Wage and Hour Division has enforcement procedures; their contact information is provided on their webpage.
These requirements cannot be reduced by state law. The state of Texas has its own minimum wage law as well as the Texas Payday Law which governs the timing of paydays and criminalizes an employer’s intentional failure to pay employees. The Texas Workforce Commission has a website that provides general information on Texas law as well as the procedures for instituting a wage and hour complaint. Their webpage provides telephone numbers (top of the page) and email addresses (bottom of the page) that you can use to contact them with questions about the laws they administer and their enforcement procedures.
Before initiating these procedures, you might want to consider that your employer is genuinely unaware of these rules and would alter their practices if given information about state and federal wage and hour laws. If this avenue is unavailing, you then need to consider your next steps and the involvement of these agencies.
Now that’s exactly what I was looking for. I looked through the Texas statutes but didn’t see anything about calculating time. The federal laws are a bit harder to find. I can definitely use this to back me up.
Oh I plan on talking to them about it before contacting the government. I just wanted something to back me up so they couldn’t just tell me to deal with it. I also was worried it was a civil law and I’d have to sue them to get it, which isn’t worth it. Glad to see that’s not the case.
Your better off simply filing an anonymous complaint with your state board of labor wages and hours division.
Your employer knows he’s cheating you, this is obvious. If you go to him, they are just as apt to say “So,” then where does that leave you? You’re going to have to file a complaint and your employer will know exactly who did it.
Now that means the employer isn’t going to be happy and you better be prepared to live up to every rule in the employee handbook or get written up.
File an anonymous complaint and be done with it.
I think it’s much better to start with the employer rather than complaining to the state, especially if we’re talking about a small company. Small companies are often run by people who have little idea of what they’re doing - they certainly can’t afford a full-time HR department and they are often well-meaning but uninformed. In addition, states have bigger fish to fry than worry about a few quarter-hours screwed up by some small employer.
I’ll second this. I have a lot of management experience but in running my own business I’ve taken on a lot of responsibilities for which I lacked experience or training. Of course the reality is when you start your own business you often don’t have the financial resources to do things any other way, meaning you have to learn all these different roles and do them “good enough.” (Eventually though I’ve found it very cost effective to simply outsource normal-HR functions.)
When I was actually dreadfully managing payrolls myself with Quick Book I always did everything to the employee’s favor if I had to ever round. Only our maintenance guys were ever hourly and they worked for my brother who generally kept track of how much they worked in a week by asking them how many hours they had put in for the week. Is it possible they were fleecing us? Sort of, but not really. As long as the maintenance work got done in the grand scheme of things there wasn’t much they could do to screw us over. We were then and are now small enough that it’s not like they could be reporting 80 hours a week and slip through unnoticed amongst thousands upon thousands of payroll records.
Round to the nearest 15 minutes? Good God, if I did that our techs would lynch me. Auto repair shop - we round to the nearest minute. IMHO, it’s easier to do this than a 15 minute rounding. And there’s never any bitching.
The state and the feds are charged with enforcing these laws and regulations, and they take this obligation seriously. All complaints will be investigated and wage payment orders will issue if appropriate.
I am unimpressed by the ignorance defense. I have trouble believing that this company really has no misgivings about the lawfulness of potentially docking 28 minutes of pay per day; rather I suspect they think this is a neat disciplinary measure they’ve devised. They should be crisply and matter-of-factly disabused of their error and made aware that anything other than immediate compliance with the law will result in complaints being lodged with the appropriate enforcement divisions of the state and federal Departments of Labor.
I think you’re right. I hired on nearly 4 years ago. At that time, there were around 30 people working for the company and the same man had owned it for about 30 years. Now there’s more than double that and ownership has changed as well as the person who calculates time (more than once). The person who calculated it when I got there wouldn’t do anyone any favors. (That’s about as nicely as I can put it.) The ones since then are probably just following tradition and don’t realize it’s illegal. Showing them that law would probably get things straightened out and that’s the way I’d rather do it. I didn’t even really expect them to round to the nearest, just subtract and then round down, instead of rounding both clock in and clock out against me. The former is easier anyway. I don’t want to have to stay 15 minutes late to make up for coming in 2 minutes late.
Then again, if talking to them doesn’t work, that’ll put me in a hard place. Frankly, I wouldn’t be easily replaced but I don’t think upper management thinks so. Still, I’m leaning towards talking to them being the best course of action.
Every job I’ve had that involved a time clock, it registered the time in hours and two decimal places. i.e. 6:45pm would be 18.75
No rounding was done at all, you clocked in just before your shift and clocked out when done and you were paid for every minute. The only adjustment was figuring your hours from your scheduled start time.
(Start time 7:00am, punch in at 6.95, punch out at 15.25- time would be figured from 7.00-15.25.)
I worked at Tim Hortons recently and their proprietary software did the same sort of rounding as the OP has described. For an additional example, my shift was 6 AM to 2 PM - 8 hours. I could punch in at 5:46 AM and punch out at 6:14 and my time card would round it to 6 AM/2 PM - 8 hour; regardless of the fact I worked 8:28 minutes. It was blatant theft.
The even more outrageous thing was that the clocks on the computers didn’t match the punch in clocks, so even if you punched out at exactly 2 PM, it would occasionally still round down to 1:45 PM. This setup forcing you to constantly remind the manager to fix your hours, which they perpetually “forgot” to do.
Can anybody direct my to a relevant Canadian labour law that would address this issue? (I’m in Ontario if the relevant labour legislation is provincial.) I’d love to start / threaten a class-action lawsuit. Thousands of minimum wage immigrants across Canada spend an extra few minutes at Tim Hortons each day to make sure they are punching in and out “on” time, and that is absolutely ridiculous.
Yeah, I wasn’t going to get into all that but that’s how ours works too. My company pays by the quarter hour though, not by the minute. If you clock in at 06.05, they’re going to round that to 06.25. I make sure if I do, then I stay until 14.55 so I’m getting my full shift in, but sometimes they still only pay me for 7.75 hours (30 minute lunch).
This is not accurate. Employees must be paid a minimum wage for all hours worked. If you make more than the minimum wage, and work one or two “free” hours in a week, as long as your average hourly rate does not drop below the minimum wage, then the employer is not violating the FLSA nor the rules promulgated by the DOL. Thus, the regulations about timeclocks are only important for overtime and for contractually obligated pay.
see US v Klinghoffer, which is still the accepted rule even after 50 years.
Texas probably hews closely to the federal interp of the FLSA under whatever Texas statutes there are (Most states have a “State law is just like the FLSA” statute), but I’m not going to check Texas statutes.
Now, if you are working more than 40 hours a week, you have an overtime claim (say you clock exactly 40 but worked 41). There are some exceptions to the overtime rule, but it’s mostly for specific jobs.
If you have an employment contract or collective bargaining agreement, then it controls – if the contract says X pay/hr you are entitled to that.
I’d say you don’t have a claim at all barring some specific Texas statute that goes against the dominant interpretation of the FLSA. You won’t win under FLSA, though, unless you are missing out on overtime.
ETA: By the way, it is a civil suit that you would file. The government might or might not investigate, but generally levy fines, etc, and don’t collect for you (though it’s good evidence in your civil suit). But I wouldn’t go running to your boss yet, because the law is on his side with the facts given. You should talk to a Texas attorney, though.
I only scanned the Klinghoffer decision you linked to but it doesn’t appear to say anything about the situation being discussed here except as it relates to overtime pay- unless you’re talking about this:
…which appears to be irrelevant to the case actually being decided, and therefore not binding, unless I’m missing something.
Relevant guidelines from the Texas Workforce Commission do not mention any contradictory
Texas statute, incidentally (or any Texas statute at all, for that matter).