Travel time cases that center around what is/is not home-to-work travel can be very tricky and nuanced. This is especially so when employees have to first meet at a staging point or meeting place and then be transported to the worksite. In another take on this premise, a group of bricklayers have filed a class action, seeking pay for a one-hour shuttle ride from a meeting point to a job site. The case is entitled Carter v. JT Thorpe & Son and was filed in state court in the Court of Common Pleas in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania.
The employee claims the workers were not allowed to punch in (and start getting paid) until they arrived at the work location. The plaintiff alleges violations of the Pennsylvania Minimum Wage Act and the Wage Payment and Collection Law. Interestingly, although the named plaintiff is a non-Pennsylvania resident and the employer is a California-based company, the plaintiff claims Allegheny County, Pennsylvania is appropriate because the employer transacts a good deal of business in that area. (We will see about that, I assume, in a wrong venue motion?)
The plaintiff alleges that the Company gave the moniker “per diems” to the hourly wages. By using that claimed artifice, the plaintiff alleges that the Company excluded those hours, the shuttle hours, from the weekly total of hours worked. He charges that “JT Thorpe knowingly, willfully, and/or in reckless disregard carried out its illegal shuttle practice and per diem pay scheme that deprived Carter and the other hourly employees of earned wages for all hours worked and overtime at the proper premium rate for all hours worked after 40 in a week in violation of the PMWA and WPCL.”
The plaintiff asserts a class action is the preferable way to litigate these charges because there are too many potential plaintiffs so that joinder of all of them would be inefficient. He also claims that any job differences between hourly workers would not undermine the validity of the class. He claims that “the putative class of hourly employees is held together by JT Thorpe’s illegal shuttle practice and per diem pay scheme, which systematically deprived Carter and the other hourly employees of earned wages for all hours worked and overtime at the proper premium rate for all hours worked after 40 in a week.”
The Takeaway
I have handled these meeting place cases. If there is a security reason, like workers doing construction at an airport, where access is limited and security tight, the travel time from the staging point is not compensable. That is typically considered a continuation, another leg, on the home-to-work commute. The employer has to look for a reason why the meeting place is a necessary adjunct to the commute and stand on that ground.
Certainly defensible…
[View source.]
