Workplaces to See More Spats over After-Hours Work
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NEW YORK (Reuters)
- Should an employee get paid for reading a BlackBerry at the dinner
table, sending an office e-mail or posting a job-related blog at home?
A spat at ABC News over paying writers to check their BlackBerries
on their own time recently raised the issue, and such a dispute marks
the leading edge of a deluge of unresolved and potentially heated cases
to come in the United States, experts say.
The growing technical ability to work remotely, combined the growth
of work-related legal disputes, is raising "lots of smaller-scope
issues of this kind," said John Thompson, an expert in wage and hour
law at Fisher & Phillips in Atlanta.
"We've never seen anything like it. Just the question of what is
work and what isn't is a practically endless question," he said. "It is
going to drive to the surface all kinds of issues that nobody's ever
thought of before."
At ABC, the broadcaster proposed that three new writers would not be
compensated for checking their office-issued BlackBerries after working
hours. The union, the Writers Guild of America, East, objected.
A compromise was reached that allowed writers and producers to be
paid for using BlackBerries after hours but only under certain
circumstances.
"Simply checking a BlackBerry is not our big concern," said Lowell
Peterson, executive director of the Writers Guild, East. "Our folks are
professionals. They're not going to start putting in overtime slips for
2.1 minutes.
"Our concern is we don't want this to grow into a major work commitment that people don't get paid for," he said.
The issue is not so much tapping out a brief message on a
BlackBerry; it's the ability to write articles, post blogs, draft
documents, research the Internet or sign contracts, all on a tiny,
mobile, handheld gadget, experts say.
"Technology is going to continue to move in that direction,"
Peterson said. "It was important to us to make it clear that here's
where we stand. This is not going to become an unpaid 24-7 workplace."
IT Management 
