Authored by Cheryl Luce
Employers often grapple with what to do when their policies prohibit off-duty work, like working on mobile devices after hours, that employees don’t follow. Even if it has a policy prohibiting off-duty work, if the employer knows (or should know) an employees is working, the employer must compensate the employee for the off-duty work. The same can be said if an employer has a policy requiring employees to report all off-duty time worked but knows (or should know) that employees are not reporting it. As the regulations put it, employers cannot “sit back and accept” work without compensating it, even though the employer has rules against it. 29 C.F.R. § 785.13.
But what about when the employer knows that employees are working off-duty, but does not know that employees aren’t reporting their time? Does the requirement that an employer must exercise “reasonable diligence” to unearth unreported work mean the employer has a responsibility to check what it knows of employees’ off-duty work against the time they report? Earlier this month, the Seventh Circuit agreed that the FLSA’s “suffer or permit to work” standard does not go so far.
In Allen v. City of Chicago, police officers at the Chicago Police Department’s Bureau of Organized Crime claimed that they were owed overtime pay for off-duty work on their BlackBerrys, even though they failed to report the overtime using the police department’s time slip reporting system. The trial court concluded that the Bureau supervisors knew the officers sometimes worked off-duty on their BlackBerrys, but they did not know or have reason to know that the officers were not submitting time slips for such work. Affirming the judgment in favor of the police department, the Seventh Circuit held that the trial court reasonably concluded that requiring the police department to check what they knew of the officers’ off-duty work against officers’ time slips they approved would be “extremely impractical.”
The Allen police officers also contended that the police department discouraged them from seeking overtime payment for off-duty BlackBerry work, which stopped them from submitting time slips for the work. Neither the trial court nor the Seventh Circuit were moved by the evidence in support of this argument. No supervisor ever told plaintiffs not to submit time slips for BlackBerry work, and no officer was disciplined for submitting such time slips. The plaintiffs’ de facto policy theory failed.
This case serves as a reminder that employers are only required to pay for off-duty work that they know or should have known was performed—not what they could have known was performed. Assuming it has no reason to believe an employee who sometimes works off hours is working off the clock, an employer in the Seventh Circuit is generally not required to cross-check the employee’s timecards to make sure they are reporting all time worked.