Carrying a Briefcase Does Not Translate into a Compensable Commute under the FLSA

Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, time spent commuting to and from the workplace is generally not compensable. Under the Portal-to-Portal Act, the FLSA excludes from compensable time all of the time spent "traveling to and from the actual place of performance of the principal activity" of employment. There are various exceptions, generally arising when an employee's commute is substantially changed for the benefit of the employer. However, the fact that an employee carries its employer's documents to and from work does not invoke such an exception, and employees who carry a briefcase during their commute are not entitled to be paid a wage for their commute time, even if that means lugging 20 pounds worth of documents home each night, according to a recent Second Circuit opinion.

Plaintiffs-appellants Rajkumar Singh, Thomas S. Matthews, Vivek N. Patil, Trushant Shah, Faramarz Robeny and Fredo Joseph (collectively the "plaintiffs") appeal from a June 2, 2006 judgment of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (Castel, J.), granting summary judgment to defendant-appellee City of New York (the "City") and denying the plaintiffs' cross-motion for summary judgment. The plaintiffs are fire alarm inspectors employed by the City who assert that they must be compensated under the Fair Labor Standards Act ("FLSA"), 29 U.S.C. § 201 et seq., for their commuting time because the City requires them to carry inspection documents during their commutes. We hold that carrying inspection documents while commuting is not work under the FLSA except to the extent that it increases the duration of a commute. Because the record shows that such an increase in commuting time is de minimis as a matter of law, we AFFIRM the district court’s judgment that none of the plaintiffs’ commuting time is compensable under the FLSA.
...
In the commuting context, we believe that the appropriate application of the predominant benefit test is whether an employer's restrictions hinder the employees' ability to use their commuting time as they otherwise would have had there been no work-related restrictions.

Singh v. City of New York (2nd Cir. 2008) __ F.3d __ (Case No. 06-2960-cv).