Shady Practices: You Can’t Refuse to Pay Employees

My posts are delayed this morning because I am arguing with the payroll woman at my job.

The hospital where I work has a lot of training requirements. We are assigned mandatory training every month. Some of it is in the form of traditional, in-person classes, some of it is online training, and some of it is simulation training that must be done at the hospital. We are not given time to do this while we are on our regular shift, because that time is taken up providing patient care. For the month of May, that comes to about

If we clock in (using a time clock on site, or if we clock in virtually by signing in online) to do this training at a date and time that is outside of our scheduled shift, it has to be approved. I just got a call from work and was told that some of my training hours were not approved, and I would not be getting paid for them.

The Department of Labor says that an employer doesn’t have to pay you for training time if that training meets four criteria:

• it is outside normal hours
• it is voluntary
• it is not job related, and
• no other work is concurrently performed.

We have a problem. Actually, WE don’t have a problem, my employer does. When an employer tells you that completing training is mandatory, they don’t have the option of telling you that the hours need to be approved. They have to pay you, it’s the law. Here is a handy guide for employers that explains it:

As we mentioned earlier, the FLSA requires that employees be paid at least one and a half times the regular wage rate for all hours worked over 40 in one workweek. When calculating the number of hours an employee works, you’ll need to include all compensable time, which includes unauthorized work time if you know or have reason to know about it. Essentially, if the employee works over 40 hours a week in any way, you’re liable for compensating them for it.

So, even if you have a policy in your employee handbook that states overtime must be approved by a manager in advance, if an employee works it anyway – in violation of the policy – you still must pay them. That’s because the FLSA considers “work not requested but suffered or permitted” to be work time. The reason doesn’t matter; if you know or have reason to believe the employee is continuing to work, that time is working time.

In this case, they made the training mandatory, but leave it to the employee to schedule and complete the training on their own time. The employee has to clock in and out, then has to list the hours, date, and time on a spreadsheet in the company computer system so training can verify that it was legitimate. Then after the fact, the training department “validates” the hours so that payroll can approve it. In many cases, the training people will “deny” the hours, and the employee just doesn’t get paid for completing the training.

That isn’t what the law says. I don’t have to get overtime approved if my employer knows that I am working it. They have to pay me. Period. Now they are free to fire me if I am working unauthorized overtime, but it still has to be paid.

Now many of you will say “Well, just don’t do the training, then.” If you don’t complete the training for a given month, you get removed from the schedule and are not permitted to come to work until you complete that training. That is part of how they make it mandatory. Here is an example of a required training notice, directly from an email that I received this morning:

This is a notice to help remind you that your NIH Stroke Scale Certification is due to expire in approximately 90 days. It is your responsibility to renew and provide the appropriate documentation to Human Resources in order to continue to work after 08/17/2024. In accordance with your facility’s policy, if you do not renew prior to the expiration date you may be subject to suspension and possible termination.

While we are on that topic, some of the training that they make us attend is held at another location/hospital. This requires drives that are up to an hour long to get to the other location. The law says that they have to pay you for the time spend driving to the other location. This is what the DOL has to say about that:

An employee who regularly works at a fixed location in one city is given a special one day assignment in another city and returns home the same day. The time spent in traveling to and returning from the other city is work time, except that the employer may deduct/not count that time the employee would normally spend commuting to the regular work site.

Since I have been working there, I have been told to go to another hospital for training on 12 different occasions. The total travel time for those 12 occasions is about 35 hours, and I can prove it because I keep records. It normally takes me 40 minutes round trip to get to and from work at my normal hospital, so that means that they owe me 28 hours of pay for travel time for those 12 days. That means they owe me money that is roughly equivalent to a week’s pay. So far.

I am going to see the ED department head about this the next time I am there for work. If they aren’t willing to pay me for those hours, my next step will be filing a complaint with the Florida Department of Labor’s wage and hour division. As soon as I file the complaint, they can’t fire me for working the overtime, because it then becomes unlawful retaliation.

As long as I am filing the complaint for the declined hours, I may as well include all of the travel time to the other hospitals while we are at it. If my complaint is investigated by DOL and shown to be true, the penalties can be expensive:

If you don’t pay overtime when it’s due, you have to pay back wages for the time worked. If you neglect to pay overtime properly and a complaint is filed with the DOL, you’ll pay damages, penalties, and a fine. For employers who willfully or repeatedly violate the overtime requirements, you could face a civil monetary penalty of up to $1,000 for each violation.

Now consider that there are 250 nurses who work in just the emergency department in just the one hospital where I work, with each one of those nurses being tasked with the same training requirements that I have. How many violations do you think there are? Two thousand? More? Those fines get expensive.