Paul DeCamp, Member of the Firm in the Employment, Labor & Workforce Management practice, in the firm’s Washington, DC, office, was featured in HR Dive, in “5 Timekeeping Tips from a Former WHD Administrator,” by Katie Clarey.
Following is an excerpt:
There’s no way an employer can completely eliminate the possibility of a wage and hour claim when it records employee working time. Federal law introduces ambiguity over compensable and non-compensable time, and that alone can give rise to potential claims.
“You have to accept that as table stakes when you’re an employer. There’s no risk-free way to be an employer, especially when it comes to timekeeping,” said Epstein Becker Green Member Paul DeCamp. “There’s no set-it-and-forget-it way to do this that guarantees you’ll never have a claim arise.”
The murky nature of timekeeping doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to minimize claims, DeCamp pointed out. In the last 80 years, timekeeping claims have featured a consistent crop of issues. Plaintiffs have argued that rounding practices disproportionately favored employers, that time records failed to capture time worked during prep activities or end-of-day procedures, that managers pressured employees to underreport their working time.
These claims hint at practices employers should follow to avoid timekeeping trouble, said DeCamp, who previously served as an administrator at the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division. In an interview with HR Dive, DeCamp laid out five tips employers can follow to minimize claims of timekeeping violations.
Tip #1: Educate supervisors about pay practices
Employers must understand the importance of paying workers correctly and emphasize that message among supervisors and managers, DeCamp said. “That mindset can head off a lot of the sorts of bad behavior that occurs in the workplace, or that plaintiffs allege occurs in the workplace,” he said.
Managers are often pressured to lower costs and improve efficiency. As they pursue those goals, they may not understand when they cross a line separating the legal from the illegal. They may, for example, encourage workers to shave their time when they report their hours. Employers can prevent such wage and hour violations with education and training, DeCamp said.
Employers may want to teach the basic requirements of the Fair Labor Standards Act and relevant state and local wage laws to supervisors “as a baseline minimum,” DeCamp said. And managerial employees should understand that it’s imperative to pay workers for all working time.
