Fox Searchlight Pictures, Inc. and Fox Entertainment Group, Inc filed a motion for a partial reconsideration of the class action ruling against it. They also requested that it be stricken from the Fed. R. Civ. P. 23 New York Labor Law class action and Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”) collective action definitions.

This is not a story about a worker's timesheet or being denied overtime hours. It's about how a worker got paid. A Pennsylvania woman who worked for one month at a local McDonald's is suing because her paycheck could only be accessed using a debit card with onerous fees, instead of a paper paycheck or electronic direct deposit. This new alternative form of payment may sound sensible considering the ubiquitousness of debit cards.

On the surface, this case may seem trivial. But if you are payroll manager or human resources director you should read on.

Public defenders in the state of Missouri are beginning in a new practice that could change the way they handle their overflowing caseloads: they are tracking their time in five minute intervals.

This kind of time documentation is something corporate lawyers commonly use to justify how they bill clients. In turn, tracking hours this way allows them to justify how they have spent their time on client matters.

Public defenders are famous for being overburdened with cases and therefore tremendous amounts of paperwork and case preparation, to say nothing of actual court time. It is a branch of the legal profession that burns out many idealistic young lawyers, not only because of heavy workloads, but because validly-reached verdicts within the judicial system do not always equal just outcomes. How a public defender spends their time, what type of research they do, what avenues of defense they pursue, can weigh heavily on a client's guilt or innocence. So far, standard practice has been to not track this data.

The potential significance of this new time tracking practice is huge. First, more thorough documentation of the work public defenders do might be helpful in client appeals. Second, they could become the basis for policy changes that provide for improved best practices, or even greater funding for public defenders.

Some workers were paid too much. Others were paid too little. Health coverage was cancelled by mistake. Retirement contributions that should have been made were not made.

A test of a new payroll system on 1,300 California state employees didn't go very well. SAP Public Services, a well-known and respectd enterprise software company, was the vendor and they were fired by the state controller's office. About $50 million had gone to SAP so far. Stories like this for government agency systems are more common than you would think. A great deal of development implementation dollars were spent before the pilot test began. So it's not a huge surprise that the project lost money. That it lost so much is shocking and yet familiar. In reviewing this story, it should be noted that the author is writing using an insider's view having worked for California state agencies in the past.

Here are the details. The LA Times reported the new payroll system was supposed to work for about 294,000 state employees. The Sacramento Bee, using a searchable list of state employees and their salaries says the number of state employees is over 300,000. The Bee source says some of these employees are UC sports coaches that make over $1,000,000 per year and a number of professors with salaries that are also very high.

But there's even more complexity to understand. There may be close to 375 state agencies in California, many with different payroll systems. Making matters more challenging, state employees within different divisions, but working in the same departments, sometimes were using different timesheet systems, even though they may have office cubes one hundred feet apart. Worse yet, funding for various employees can come from different sources, such as a university, a non-profit like the American Lung Association or a large employee vendor. So state employees are paid by sources other than the State, but they do work for the State as a public service.

Some startling and impressive facts emerged from the recent TechAmerica annual Cyberstates report. First, California is number one in the nation for technology employment with almost one million employees. That's a whopping number of workers. You can imagine the tech sector payroll in California is huge, and it is: $120 billion. California not only has almost one million tech sector workers, the Golden State also has the fastest rate of growth for tech workers. They are also among the highest paid in the nation. Technology workers in California technology workers earned an average pay of $123,900 a year. That number is undoubtedly driven up by successful IPOs for companies like FaceBook.

US Department of Labor Free iPhone App for Time Tracking Hits 14,000 Downloads
After nearly two years of availability, a free iPhone app called DOL-Timesheet created by the US Department of Labor has been downloaded 14,000 times, according to XYO.net. The point of the app is not at all to replace standard time sheets used by companies, but to allow workers to track their own time. In a case of an investigation or audit, then an employee would have her or his own hours documented and could provide evidence of time worked, with dates  and having used a respectable method. A free app like this could come in especially handy if an employee's work hours are recorded by someone other than the employee, such as a manager.

The link to the app is here.

Being able to track hours using a portable personal device must be an advantage, because of the ready and constant accessibility. Especially during field work, when an employee might not have access to a company desktop or laptop and is working odd hours, such an app might serve a critical purpose. The app does not handle things like holiday and weekend pay, tips, or commissions. This new Department of Labor app might have some serious ramifications. For example, a company's own timesheet tracking might not easily be accessible to employees, automated adequately, or employee timesheets might not be tracked and stored properly. Employers could be in the embarrassing position of having less reliable timesheet data than their individual employees using this Department of Labor app.  

Contract Employees are Replacing Some Full-time Workers
A recent survey from CareerBuilder found that 40% of companies plan to use contractors this year. A little over 30% of new jobs in the private sector created after the recession ended were contract positions. Before the recession, the number of new contract positions was only about 2%. The reasons for this major shift are obviously related to cost-cutting by companies that are trying to survive. Recruiters who don't work with contract workers and help them with their timesheets (usually Web-based) could be left behind by a shifting economy. Additionally, staffing companies surveyed predict that 40-50% of all employees will be contracted staffers by 2020. If this were the case, a great many corporations would need to have extensive cloud-based timesheet systems to track these contract workers across the enterprise.

Image Credit: AgnosticPreacherKid, Wiki Commons

Google will track attendee whereabouts at the Google I/O at Moscone Center. Some might find this kind of granular people data tracking very offputting, but Big Data is not going away, ever. In point of fact, it seems much more likely with the development and proliferation of more sensors and the additional data points, almost everything under the Sun will be fair game for tracking.


At a conference several years ago (admittedly a very tedious one) two employees were overheard planning their escape to a local shopping center. If they had been wearing sensors, perhaps all of their movements would have been recorded and management would have hard data about their play time when they were supposed to be at the conference. So, the question is what to do with the data, because bored employees might be indicating that part of the conference was wasted time for everyone, not just those two.

While this kind of people monitoring can appear far too Big Brotherish, some employees do try to submit fraudulent timesheets, as was the case in Texas recently.

'The indictment also alleges that in order to personally profit from their fraudulent billings, Ramirez and Velasquez allegedly created payroll records from the fraudulent time sheet that they sent to Caring Touch’s payroll staff.' (Source: 7thspace.com)

The home healthcare company did nothing wrong, but two employees were charged with fraud after altering time records in order to receive payroll checks without having actually done the work. Well over 600 false and fraudulent claims were submitted, resulting in payments totaling $155,127.72. Texas Medicaid, Evercare, and Superior were the organizations that paid these exorbitant and illegally obtained funds.

So, even though there is much potential for the abuse of personal and employee data, time tracking and potentially even people tracking can be warranted in certain contexts.

Image Credit: Public Domain, Wikipedia

The Story of Kristi Rifkin and T-Mobile

In a recent news story, Kristi Rifkin, a T-Mobile call center employee detailed the trials of being forced to clock out and back in for bathroom breaks during her pregnancy. There was an issue in conflict between the employee (she needed to go to the bathroom more frequently during her pregnancy) and the employer (they wanted to have her clocked out during the time she was not at her desk or, more importantly, not on the phone with customers, the main work of the call center).

9/80 Compressed Timesheets

9/80 compressed work schedules have many benefits. However, automating timesheets for these schedules has proven to be difficult.