How to clock time on a mandatory shuttle?

Question

Most of my organization's employees park at the office, but there aren't enough spots for everyone. The company has an overflow lot 10 minutes from the building where about 20% of the employees are required to park. The company provides a shuttle to and from the office.

My question is: When should an hourly employee be considered "clocked in" and "clocked out"? When they arrive at the overflow lot? When they get on the shuttle? Or when they get to their desk?

Some relevant details:

• Parking is not 'first come, first serve', some employees are disallowed from parking in the main lot.
• The shuttle runs continuously; there are no set times for arrival or departure. Arriving at the lot as the shuttle is leaving means a 20 minute wait. Consequently, if an employee must be at his desk at 9:00 AM, they must get to the lot by 8:30 AM.
• The office is in a suburban area without easy access to public transportation; I am not aware of anyone who walks/bikes/gets to work without a car.

EDITS

• The office is in New Jersey, USA.
• Parking assignment doesn't correlate to position in the company or seniority.

Answer 1

If you live in the United States, the 11th Circuit Court ruled in Bonilla v. Baker Concrete that such time need not be compensated under 29 USC §254(a) (the Portal-to-Portal Act). An appeal to the Supreme Court was denied. This has been applied in much more egregious cases where the workers were compelled to spend over 3 hours travelling.

There is a similar case concerning workers being forced to wait in a security line at Amazon (Integrity Staffing Solutions, Inc. v. Busk) that has been accepted by the Supreme Court, so it's possible the interpretation of the law could change.

EDIT/update: It looks like SCOTUS ruled in favor of not paying

Nonetheless, right now you cannot legally force the company to clock the time. Of course, as other answers point out, your employer is by no means required to use the law as a bludgeon against you. Perhaps you can work something out.

Answer 2

As with many things in the working world, it depends on when your manager says you should clock in above all, and then what the company policy says.

Commute Time and Pay

Let's say I'm working hourly at office in A-Town. The company's lease is going to expire and they decide to move the office to B-Town. A-Town was a 15 minute commute for me. B-Town is a 45 minute commute. Do I get to bill the company for the additional 60 minutes a day I spend commuting because of the change?

Think of the commuting situation as a 'perk'. Part of the cost-benefit analysis you do for any job should be how long it actually takes you to get to your desk. This is a great question to ask in interviews before you decide to take the job as it can greatly change how you value the job offer.

Negotiating Poor Conditions

When you have poor commuting conditions, the best you can hope for is to negotiate better pay to make up for the poor commuting conditions, or some other perk to mitigate that drawback.

Is your issue that you hate waiting for the shuttle? Then try to negotiate a parking space in the main lot. Do you care more about the potential 20 minutes you may wait for the shuttle? Adjust your hourly rate so that for 480 minutes (8 hours) in the office, you are getting paid for 520 minutes (including the shuttle time).

If you are on a contract with regular renewal, this may be difficult to negotiate mid-stream, but is something to consider moving forward or the next time you get a job with similar conditions.

Talk to your Manager

If you are not at a point where you can negotiate, I suggest you talk with your manager. If your company is not recording your time automatically (punch cards, computer on-off time, badged in/out of the front door, etc.), then the final say over how your time gets logged will likely fall to your manager. Even if the official rule is, "Only log time that the employee is at their workstation" or something of the sort, your manager may be able to grease the wheels of justice to something more amenable to you.

For instance:

Hey boss, I've always been clocking my time from the time I get to my desk until the time I leave it. Since I park in the satellite lot, and am at the mercy of the shuttle as to when I show up. Even though I get my work done by the end of the day, because of that shuttle I have to stick around another 15-30 minutes to get the same pay because of the shuttle. Any chance you would be okay with me rounding up my time worked so long as I get the job done?

Assuming everything you say is true, and you've been doing a good job, your boss may be more interested in keeping you happy than in enforcing the letter of the law. At the end of the day though, you should go by whatever he says, which means living at the mercy of the shuttle if he says it's necessary until you have a chance to negotiate the terms of your employment.

Answer 3

You should check your company's policy, but typically you'd not clock in until you are at work and ready to work. If getting to the lot at 830 is the only way to ensure you can get the shuttle and arrive on time, that's what you should plan to do. It doesn't seem this would be any different than taking a public bus to your office.

Answer 4

A good way to describe this might be that it is "at the company's convenience" for you to park in the remote lot, in that you're required to park there instead of in the main lot. That alone sounds like argument that you should be able to get to the lot at your prescribed time (ie, 9am), and then take the slow shuttle bus across town if that is what your company wants you to do all day. Of course, I would talk to your manager about this first.

Answer 5

When should an hourly employee be considered "clocked in" and "clocked out"? When they arrive at the overflow lot? When they get on the shuttle? Or when they get to their desk?

In general, employees "clock in" when they are ready to start working. In your case, this means "when they get to their desk".

The phrase "clock in" derives from the time when employees had their arrival time noted in a ledger. Later devices like punch cards stamped the arrival time on their record. In both cases, it was their arrival at their place of work in a condition ready to begin work (and thus to start being paid for their labor).

How you arrive at your desk is up to you. You could choose to walk to work, you could choose to drive in and use the shuttle. You might live next door to the building and have a 2-minute "commute" or you might choose to live 2 hours away and have a 3-hour commute. Most companies don't pay for your commute time.

Think of it this way - if you live next door, and I live 2 hours away, should I have a 4-hour workday and you have an 8-hour workday - both at the same daily pay rate? You are paid for your work time, not for the time you spend getting to your desk.

Answer 6

I am admittedly neither an expert nor a lawyer so cannot tell you for sure how this works in the general case, but in my most recent two employers the rules have been the same. If you are travelling from off site into work you are not paid, however you are paid for travelling between sites owned and run by the employer.

I suppose it is then a matter of interpretation as to if you are simply being provided a service by your employer (a free bus in) or if your employer requires you to enter one work owned site and then travel to another in the course of your working day. In the later case most employers will pay you, but the earlier is a lot more fuzzy.