Kansas Travel Time and FLSA
Posted by Tamara
The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA) serves several functions. This law establishes minimum wage, rules for overtime pay, and defines paid travel time.
For employees in Kansas, travel time has raised some questions. Is the time traveled between job sites considered paid time? Is the travel time traveled from home to the first job site of the day considered paid time?
FLSA says yes and no, with conditions. Any employee who travels between job sites as part of the regular workday must be paid for that time. An employee that travels from home to the first job site every day is only eligible for pay if that first job site is outside the company’s “normal commuting area.”
What is a “normal commuting area”? The answer is it depends on the employer and location. There is no standard definition under FLSA, or under the U. S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division. Understand that in a spread out city like Chicago an hour commute would probably be considered within the employer’s normal commuting area. A company in a smaller town like Manitowoc, Wisconsin, however, might consider the 20 minute drive to nearby Sheboygan as outside its normal commuting area.
The assumption behind the normal commuting area is that employees have to spend some amount of time to get to work already. Paid travel time would apply only for additional driving, say on a special assignment to another city, or to a job site outside the normal commuting area for that company.
As a result of this assumption, employers are perfectly within their rights to consider only the additional time as paid travel time. For instance, Bob Yarborough normally drives 35 minutes to work each day. On a special assignment in another town, he must drive 65 minutes to work. His employer can deduct his usual 35 minute commute from the 65 minute commute and pay only for the 30 minutes additional.
These rules apply only to travel during the workday. Overnight trips are handled under different rules.
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