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


What my lawyer said about FIESA - sm


Posted: Jul 11, 2014

I was seeing my lawyer for other legal matters and asked him if he  knew anything about labor law.  He said a little.  I told him how we are paid by production, which includes providing our own computers, work environments at home, reading and responding to company email  and you know, every other little thing we have to do like searching for patients, etc., etc., etc., and now we are expected to log into FIESA and sign off on "errors."  He said off the top of his head, we are "at will" employees and we can be fired for not doing what we are instructed to do, like checking FIESA.  However, he said if you were fired for such, it would not preclude you from collecting unemployment.  I said, well, how would I explain that to unemployment?  He said you would just tell them you could not keep up with the job requirements.  He is having someone else look into it who is more familiar with labor law.  Keep you posted!

Fiesa requirement - More disgusted than ever

[ In Reply To ..]
Nice how the lawyer states we are supposed to say we "could not keep up with the job requirements". Again, OUR fault for not being able to keep up. No consideration at all of the fact we are not paid for our time.

Maybe fill your lawyer in - on this amendment

[ In Reply To ..]


Fair Labor Standards Act Portal-to-Portal Pay - Amendment

"When a work day or other pay period begins and ends is determined by a law called the Portal-to-Portal Pay Act. (29 U.S.C. § 251.) This amendment to the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and several other workplace laws require that an employee must be paid for any time spent that is controlled by and that benefits the employer.

This aspect of wage and hour law has generated a tremendous number of cases in which the courts have attempted to sharpen the definition of payable time.

Work time for which you must be paid includes all the time you must be on duty or at the workplace. However, the courts have ruled that on-the-job time does not include the time employees spend washing themselves or changing clothes before or after work, unless a workplace requires specialized protective gear or other garb that is impractical to don off the premises; nor does it include time spent in a regular commute to the workplace.

In other recent legal challenges, some courts have ruled simply that employees must be paid for prework and postwork activities that are âintegral and indispensableâ to their principal activities, rather than âde minimis.â

Those terms as defined:

Integral and indispensable activities are performed as part of employeesâ regular work in the ordinary course of business, regardless of whether they occur before or after the workday.
De minimis activities are those that take a few seconds or minutes to perform beyond the scheduled workday and that are difficult to account for administratively.

Employers are not allowed to circumvent the Portal-to-Portal Pay Act by simply âallowingâ you to work on what the employer calls your own time. You must be paid for all the time you work, voluntary or not."

Thank you, I will! - nm

[ In Reply To ..]
x

Production based jobs - This is the key

[ In Reply To ..]
From my understanding, and I am not a lawyer by any means, that with a production-based job, as long as your hourly wage does not dip below minimum wage, then they can include whatever they want as requirements. They technically can say that we must spin around in a circle 5 times every hour and film it if it's part of our job and by the end of the day it doesn't bring what they pay us below minimum wage! That is our base rate. We are not guaranteed anything above that.

Basically what can be argued is that this applies to people who are being paid for 8 hours of work, are on the clock for 8 hours, and then being asked to do things outside of those 8 hours. We're being told that checking FIESA is part of our day-to-day activities, that this is part of our required work, just like clocking in and out, checking our e-mail, or even starting our computer and opening the programs we use to work. Those are all things we do and have to do, but they aren't metered as part of our production.

I think this sucks, but I don't think we have a leg to stand on with this. The initial transcriptionists who fought for production pay and the employers that forced them into this set the standard. I mean, if these huge companies can get around the IRS description of what an Independent Contractor is, they can get around everything else they are doing! (Go look that up sometime. Look up the definition and then how many IC's a company is allowed to have, percentage wise against actual employees.)
I'm the OP - sm
[ In Reply To ..]
What about us having to sign off on our "errors" in FIESA Does that mean we agree we made these errors? Isn't it a crime that we are in the dark about this, trying to figure this out for ourselves instead of it being laid out clearly by Nuance???


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