Commuting To Work and the FLSA
by Frank L. Kollman

Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, employees do not have to be compensated for time spent commuting to work. Further, service and construction employees do not have to be paid for the time it takes them to report to their first job in the morning, unless they are first required to report into a central location. The same non-payment rule holds true if the employee travels directly from the job site to his home at the end of the day. President Clinton's first Secretary of Labor wanted to change this by forcing employers to pay for that commuting time. After all, according to the Clinton Administration, an employee could take hours to get to that first job site.

A federal appeals court has put the issue to rest by finding that the length of the commute is irrelevant to the issue of pay. In that case, a refrigerator and utility mechanic working for a large grocery chain frequently traveled over 6 hours a day to get to his first job for the day and to travel home at night. Given the large amount of time he spent commuting, he reasoned that he should be compensated for the time by his employer, the principal beneficiary of his excessive travel time.

The Court said: "Here, [the regulation] specifically provides that employers are not required to compensate employees for their "[n]ormal travel" between home and work. We interpret "normal travel," as used in this regulation, to refer to the time normally spent by a specific employee traveling to work. The term does not represent an objective standard of how far most workers commute or how far they may reasonably be expected to commute."

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