Rosen Law Office

When employees spend time putting on protective gear, they now have to be paid.

Work clothes?

Employees are not ordinarily entitled to be paid for changing into work clothes.  Under Fair Labor Standards Act § 203(o), time spent “changing clothes or washing at the beginning or end of each workday” is excluded from compensable time.  Until last month, that exception also applied to protective gear.  When workers put on their mesh aprons, plastic belly guards, mesh sleeves, plastic arm guards, wrist wraps, mesh gloves, rubber gloves, polar sleeves, rubber boots, shin guards and weight belts before a day processing meat, they were just getting dressed for work.

That has changed.

The exception for changing “clothes” no longer includes “the modern-day protective equipment commonly donned and doffed by workers in today’s … industries where protective equipment is required by law, the employer, or the nature of the job,”  according to the DOL.

Even though putting on a uniform is still not paid time, that activity may be enough to signal the start of the continuous working day.  Anything the employee does after he changes into his work clothes—travel time or waiting, for example—may now be compensable under the FLSA.

You probably know that when someone leaves a job, he has to be paid for the time he worked.  But he also has to be paid for the vacation days he earned, but didn’t take.

You may have a “use it or lose it” policy.  Your manual probably encourages employees to take advantage of their well-earned time off because it expires at the end of the year.  Until last summer, many employers believed they didn’t have to pay departing employees for  such earned but unused vacation time.

Last June, the Supreme Judicial Court clarified the situation. Even if vacation time cannot accumulate from year-to-year, and the employer doesn’t consider the vacation time “earned,” vacation time that accrues during the year is “wages,” and must be paid in full at termination.

Employees may not be forced to use up paid vacation or sick time before taking unpaid maternity leave under the Massachusetts Maternity Leave Act.

The Massachusetts Maternity Leave Act (“MMLA”) guarantees full-time female employees eight weeks of maternity leave, when giving birth or adopting a child.   This maternity leave is unpaid. An employee may choose to use vacation or sick time concurrently with her MMLA leave, but she may not be required to exhaust her paid sick and vacation time in order to use her MMLA leave.

–Nora Adukonis