A community of 30,000 US Transcriptionist serving Medical Transcription Industry

Why are we not paid for time spent waiting for a job? - sm

Posted: Mar 29, 2013

I saw this on the Nuance board. What am I missing here? It really looks like, according to the Dept of Labor, that we should be paid at least minimum wage for our time waiting for a job to pop up, and not just a lousy 15 mins per day. See the section under "waiting time." http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs22.htm

They say because.. - SS

[ In Reply To ..]
They say they are not required to pay us min wage to wait because we are not 'required' to sit there and wait. We are free to take the rest of the day off if we like with no pay. The only way they have to pay us is if they make us sit there and wait.

Do I agree with this? NO!!

So how do you keep your FT status if... - (see message)

[ In Reply To ..]
...they don't even SEND you a full day's worth of work to cover every day of the pay period that you're "scheduled" to work?

At my last job with an MTSO, I was required to put in "X" number of hours a week to keep my full-time status and full-time health-insurance benefit. There were many, many days that I had to "invest" 11 or 12 hours of my day, checking back for work in order to put in my required hours for the week. They never told me this specifically (they're very careful to never put something like that in writing!!), but it was the implied message I got from my manager. Also, had I NOT gotten in a full days' worth of work, I would never have met the lines-per-pay-period requirement. I'm not sure how you're supposed to pull lines out of thin air if there's NJA for much of the day!

If you have an entire week where only 1 or 2 hours' worth of work comes through and you end up taking the rest of the day off, wouldn't you lose your full-time status and benefits?

Of course you'd lose it... - SS

[ In Reply To ..]
They just say you are free to take the day off if no work to cover their butts BUT if you need the money you can't just walk away and take the day off. If you have line requirement for your ins you can't either.

They are good at covering their u know whats... - sm

[ In Reply To ..]
So on the one hand they say you have to have a schedule, and you are expected to work that schedule. On the other hand, during that schedule, if I run out of work, since I have the "option" of taking time off without pay, that's why they're not paying me to sit here and wait for jobs? Because of that so-called "option"? That is seriously crazy.

Yep, that "option" is a CROCK of you know what too. NM - SS

[ In Reply To ..]
NM

this will stop only when everyone complains to the DOL - (what they are doing is illegal)

[ In Reply To ..]

Unfortunately it is not - illegal

[ In Reply To ..]
They are following the law per state. Is it fair? Absolutely not! What needs to be changed is the extremely out dated "Piece Work" law.

it is illegal to instruct employees to clock out - sm

[ In Reply To ..]
If everyone stayed on the clock for eight hours only to earn $30, the MTSO would, by law, have to pay minimum wage.

You are paid for the time spent waiting for a job. - sm

[ In Reply To ..]
You need to put your time in Teamwork (15 minutes) and you will get paid minimum wage for your state (a few states compensate different than min wage). Make sure you get paid for your wait time!

but, if you wait ten and a job pops up, you do not - get paid for those ten, and...

[ In Reply To ..]
then you wait another 10 in between and you dont get paid for that 10, then a job pops up, and then you wait 8, you dont get paid for that 8 minutes, then its a total of 28 minutes already... half hour of upaid time, but MModal says it has to be a solid 15 minute wait before they pay! RIDICULOUS.

only 15 mins per day though... - sm

[ In Reply To ..]
You only get paid for 15 minutes of OOW/NJA for the day. I spend a helluva lot more time waiting than that.

Word of warning - FossilMT

[ In Reply To ..]
Maybe I'm the only one who didn't know this, but when I get NJA, I was clocking out, but leaving Fluency open so I could monitor for any jobs coming in and then clocking back in when jobs became available. My TSM informed me that I should be closing out of Fluency when I clock out, because they are monitoring our time in Fluency versus time in Teamwork so that they can stop people from "working off the clock." Seriously? It seems like it would be very simple to document whether or not jobs were being done while clocked out, instead of just assuming you were working simply because you were logged into Fluency.

My bigger question is why - MTQuilter

[ In Reply To ..]
we don't get paid for all the admin work we have to do for this company... Reading emails, replying to emails, reporting NJA on Remedy, entering NJA times in Teamwork, requesing unpaid leave for NJA in Teamwork, and all those little extra requests from above. I rack up hours and hours of this stuff over the course of a year and nary a penny for my trouble.

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