Getting Paid to Change Clothes
July 2nd, 2010When 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.