The Portal-to-Portal Act provides that “walking, riding, or traveling to and from the actual place of performance of the principal activity or activities which such employee is employed to perform” is not included in the minimum wage and overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Often, however, traveling field representatives, salesmen, repairmen, or other employees should be paid for the time they spend driving. In this post, we’ll discuss what exemptions apply to compensation for travel time in North Carolina.
The Principal Activity
To determine whether an individual employee should be paid for traveling, courts must decide the employee’s principal activity. The principal activity is the activity that a person is employed to perform. This includes all activities that are integral and indispensable to the principal activities.
For those employees who travel for the majority of their day, the driving time before and after work should be paid. When an employee is required to report to a meeting place to pick up tools or receive instructions, it may be counted as hours worked. In the case of a field inspector who reports to a central office each morning to receive assignments and reports every evening to report findings, the inspector should be compensated for the driving time.
Travel Between Job Sites
Employees should be paid for the time spent traveling from the place of their principal employment activity to another place performing another principal employment activity. For example, repairmen who travel from home to a job site and then to another job site should be compensated for the travel time from when they arrive at the first job site to when they leave the last job site. The employee should not just be compensated for the time he is working alone at the job site.
Pursuing Unpaid Wages
There are many circumstances in which an employee should be paid for the time spent traveling for work. Employees who are unlawfully not being compensated may be entitled to damages in individual, collective, and class action litigation. Such damages include unpaid wages, back pay, liquidated damages (double damages), costs, interest, and attorneys’ fees. The statute of limitations is either two or three years, depending on whether the violation was willful.
Experienced Travel Pay Unpaid Wages Attorneys
Maginnis Howard is an unpaid wage and overtime law firm representing employees who have not been lawfully paid their wages, including travel pay. Our attorneys represent individual clients and groups of employees on a class action basis. Contact our unpaid wage and overtime lawyers for a free consultation regarding your rights, or submit a confidential new case inquiry here. Our attorneys represent clients across the Carolinas from our Raleigh, Charlotte, and Fayetteville offices.
