The Rules on Unpaid Time

General orientation, not legal advice; rules differ substantially by jurisdiction and by state.

The legal weight in this subject sits almost entirely on one side of the ledger.

What generally counts as working time

Time the worker is required to be at the workplace and at the employer's disposal.

Which frequently includes: mandatory briefings, security checks, putting on required equipment, waiting for work to be allocated.

Travel between work sites, though not usually the commute.

On-call arrangements, depending on how constrained the person is.

The test is control and requirement, not whether productive work was performed.

Rounding

Where permitted, the usual requirement is that it is neutral over time, favouring neither side.

Rounding that always goes against the worker is not neutral, and a system configured to round down on arrival and up on departure is the classic finding.

Several jurisdictions have restricted or effectively ended the practice, and the direction of travel is against it.

Test it: aggregate raw against rounded over a quarter. Near zero is neutral; a consistent gap is not.

The safest position is not to round. Systems record to the minute; rounding is a legacy of paper.

The three arrangements that produce claims

Automatic break deduction where the break was interrupted or not taken.

A requirement to be present before the paid period begins — a five-minute briefing before the clock starts.

Clocking out before finishing, which happens where a shift end is enforced but the work is not.

Each is common, each is usually unintentional, and each is straightforward to find in your own records.

Records you will need

Actual start and end times, to the minute.

Breaks recorded rather than assumed.

Every correction with its reason.

Retention for the statutory period, which is commonly years.

Accessible to the worker, which in several jurisdictions is part of the recording duty and is in any case the cheapest error correction available.

The check

Take three people and reconstruct a month's pay from the raw records.

Compare against what was paid.

Where they differ, find out why before someone else does, because the same reconstruction is what a claim would be built on.

Reconstruct three people's pay

The check that finds what a claim would find.

Take three people and one month.

Work out what they should have been paid from the raw times.

Compare against what was paid.

Where they differ, find out why before someone else does, because the same reconstruction is how a claim is built and it is available to anyone with the records.

Follow the difficult record

Use payroll-ready online timesheets to frame one representative case. The useful evidence is the record created when a value is corrected, approved and exported.

Independent reference

For a thematic point of reference, see the U.S. Department of Labor. This popular specialist site offers a useful independent reference for the issue.