Can an employer withhold pay for a fire drill? Moved from WorkplaceSE. Recently there was a routine fire drill in an office building. As with most fire drills, it took about half an hour for the fire drill to complete and for everyone to get back to work. When the employees got back to their desks, they were told to charge 30 minutes of time to an overhead charge number, but then management sent out a correction saying that they were not allowed to charge the time lost during the fire drill. Instead, they had to "flex" their time (that is, make up the 30 minutes at some other time during the pay period, or else take vacation time). Is this illegal, or just bad practice? Do these employees have any recourse? Any examples of similar times when an employer mandates a period of time that an employee NOT be allowed to work during normal working hours are welcome also. Jurisdiction is in Virginia, USA, but input from other areas welcome for my curiosity. This didn't affect me personally so I'm not searching for legal advice, but it happened to some close acquaintances of mine. For them, the cost of just working an extra 30 minutes is far less than getting lawyers involved, but it did pique my interest so I thought it was worth a question.
This seems to fall under the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act, and is defined as &quot;waiting time.&quot; From Employment Law Handbook: On-duty waiting time should be counted as hours worked. It is time spent by an employee, typically during normal work hours, waiting for direction from their team lead, supervisor, or manager. These on-duty waiting time periods usually last only for a short time and can be unpredictable as to when they occur and how long they will last. The employee is generally not allowed to leave the workplace during a period of on-duty waiting time. Essentially, because the employer benefits from having the employee available for immediate engagement in work and the employee is not otherwise able to use the time effectively for their own personal purposes, on-duty waiting time must be counted as hours worked. Examples of on-duty waiting time that should be counted as hours worked include a messenger waiting for his or her next assignment, a warehouse worker waiting for a truck to arrive, factory workers waiting for machinery to be fixed, and a firemen waiting for an emergency call. Each of these examples represents a situation where the hallmarks of on-duty waiting time are present: the employee is not engaged in the work for which they were hired; remains subject to the direction of his or her employer; is not able to effectively use the time for themselves; and is unsure as to when the waiting period will occur and/or how long it will last. Employees who work away from their employer’s place of business can also be on-duty while waiting for work. Repairmen for utility companies represent a good example of when workers may experience on-duty waiting time while away from the employer’s workplace. If a repairman must wait for a home or business owner to allow them into their premises or wait for a new service call to come in, that time should be counted as hours worked for purposes of minimum wage and overtime calculations.
This has obviously never become a legal issue, so the answer is not settled, but it doesn't seem like there would be any good argument for anything other than using time as the employee experiences it. If John Glenn spends 40 hours on space shuttle repair and NASA receives 40 hours' worth of work, the fact that they only noticed 20 hours going by doesn't seem to justify slashing the worker's wages.
National Construction Code For Class 2 Buildings (apartments) the relevant volume is No 2. Door hardware on fire doors must comply with AS 1905.1 (Specification C3.4 Clause 2), that is, it has to be &quot;fire-rated&quot;. There are plenty of fire-rated deadlocks available. Normally, a door in a path of travel to an exit cannot be key operated in the direction of travel, however, there are a number of exceptions. One is if it &quot;serves only, or is within— (A) a sole-occupancy unit in a Class 2 building&quot; - like yours. So there is no regulatory obstacle to this. Strata Law The door (and its hardware) is part of the common property - it belongs to the body corporate, not you. Technically, you own the paint on the inside, they own everything else. So, even if you paid for the lock, it would belong to the body-corporate and they would bear all the risk of loss and damage including if it wasn't installed properly. They may be unwilling to take this risk. They can legally prevent you from doing anything to their property. However, you can insist that the body-corporate repair the front door. Having &quot;no plans&quot; is not an excuse for failing in their legal duty to repair and maintain the common property. If they refuse, you can use the dispute resolution process.
The thing I was trying to zero in on was the work/refresh/renovation that needs to be done between tenants, and if they landlord can expect to do it while Tenant A is still paying (up to the date of the 'lease change'), but expecting that Tenant A has vacated before that date, or allows the work to be done while they are still occupying? The first tenant is not required to relinquish possession of the premises while the first lease is in force. The landlord's right of access to the apartment remains unchanged from those specified in the lease and in state landlord-tenant law. So basically the landlord has to wait until the first tenant leaves before doing most of the work. If the first tenant relinquishes possession of the premises before the end of the lease period, the landlord can keep charging rent until the premises has been re-let to a new tenant. But if the landlord has agreed to stop charging rent when the first tenant moves out, the landlord may be bound by that agreement. If the landlord has signed a second lease with a new tenant beginning immediately after the first tenant's mutually agreed early move-out date, then the landlord basically has no time available to fix up the apartment except with the consent of one tenant or the other.
An employer doesn't have the authority to authorize its employees to violate the law. An employee who personally participates in a crime has both criminal and civil liability for the employee's actions. Private sector employers have vicarious respondeat superior civil liability for the actions of their employees taken in the scope of their duties. In other words, anything that an employee of a private sector employer is liable for, the employer is also liable for. Governmental employers do not have vicarious respondeat superior civil liability for the civil rights violations of the employees. Direct civil as opposed to vicarious civil liability, and criminal liability for an employer (governmental or private) is generally limited to acts carried out by employees of the entity at the direction of senior management or pursuant to a policy, explicit or implicit, of the employer. This said, it is the nature of large employers to break tasks into component parts spread over many employees in different parts of the employing entity. In some circumstances, an individual employee's role may be such that the employee lacks sufficient information about the overall course of action of the employer to know that their actions are part of an overall course of conduct by the employer that constitutes a crime or tort. For example, to retreat to an old school example, suppose that there is an employee who sits in front of a shredding machine all day and feeds paper into and clears paper jams, etc. whose job is to shred whatever documents are put in a bin next to his work station. This guy, who makes no decisions regarding what is to be shredded and has no real knowledge of why documents are being shredded, probably doesn't have criminal or civil liability if his labor is used to illegal destroy some documents. For all the shredder guy knows, he could simply be destroying redundant copies of documents to free up space in the filing cabinets while a single archival copy is retained. Typically, criminal laws require some level of mens rea (i.e. intent) which may be intent to do something in particular, it may be knowledge of certain facts, or what have you. An employee is generally only going to face criminal liability is the employee who carries out the wrongful act on behalf of the employer does so with the requisite knowledge and intent set forth in the criminal statute.
Authority A lot of this falls under life skills and common sense, rather than law per se. If you've lived and worked in skyscrapers and laboratories and corporate environments these are things you just come to know. Maybe some of this comes from being a Boy Scout growing up as well. Calling 911 Usually there would be a law prohibiting employment retaliation against someone making a legitimate report to law enforcement, but an employer might reasonably suggest when it is and is not appropriate to do so. Outright stopping someone from calling 911 when it is appropriate to do so would probably constitute obstruction of justice or something similar. Private Security There are a variety of tasks normally performed by private security in a business. Routine patrol to make sure that nothing is amiss and that only authorized people are in the building; excluding trespassers with non-deadly force if necessary; maintaining awareness of neighborhood security threats (e.g. protest marches, repeated crime incidents where employees go) investigating property crimes on the property after reporting the to law enforcement for insurance purposes (which usually has a policy of not investigating small dollar crimes reported to them themselves); maintenance and monitoring of security cameras; organizing fire wardens, scheduling fire drills and scheduling real fire department inspections of the premises when required; response to disturbances (if necessary notifying police); confirming that doors that should be locked are locked; alerting emergency services of fires and crimes in progress or observed; greeting legitimate employees and guests; supervising outside maintenance people; and providing minor first aid, and getting someone to health care when an ambulance is not necessary and calling for one when it is not. Their objective is to serve the company's needs, but often, those heavily overlap with the public's need in the area of security and safety. Fire Wardens A "fire warden" in an office building is responsible for: passing on information from the fire department that employees in the fire warden's unit need to know; to be alert to identify and remedy fire code violations that are identified in inspections (e.g. fire extinguishers that are no longer certified, alarm signals that are broken or need new batteries); to understand and communicate how to respond to a fire alarm and to distinguish between scheduled tests of the equipment and true drills; to supervise the conduct of fire drills and non-drill evacuations; to make sure that everyone knows the meet up location following a true fire; and to keep track of who gets out, who was never at work in the first place when there was an evacuation, and who was unable to escape. A "fire warden" is basically a responsible civilian who coordinates with the fire department which does real inspections and responds to real fires. In contrast, any competent person calls the fire department when there is a real fire that requires response and/or rescue. Any competent person might put out a fire in progress, but a fire warden would be told standard operating procedure for follow up response after an emergency fire or incident is dealt with as a putting out a visible fire in a complex urban or commercial environment is often not sufficient to know that the threat is gone. Often a fire warden would insist that the fire department be called even though there was no visible ongoing threat. This is particularly important in high rises, commercial kitchens and industrial buildings.
The US Department of Labor Employer's Guide to Advance Notice of Closings and Layoffs states Can I pay my workers their salary and benefits for 60 days in lieu of notice? Neither the Act nor the regulations recognize the concept of pay in lieu of notice. WARN requires notice, making no provision for any alternative. Failure to give notice does a significant disservice to workers and undermines other services that are part of the purpose of the WARN Act. However, since WARN provides that the maximum employer liability for damages, including back pay and benefits, is for the period of violation up to 60 days, providing your employees with full pay and benefits for the 60-day period effectively precludes any relief. (emphasis mine) So from the Federal perspective, so-called pay in lieu is technically against the WARN act, but no penalty may occur. Note that payment in lieu is not unique to this situation at all. For regulated high-trust industries, such as banking and aviation, pay in lieu is basically required due to the risk of employee sabotage.
Is this legal? Yes Or does it mean that employee will be in breach of his/her contract? Yes You are assuming that if the evidence is allowed to be presented then that automatically means that keeping it for that purpose is not a breach of the contract. This is not necessarily so; it can be both at the same time. That said, it is unlikely that an employer would attempt to sanction an employee for this as the courts would (rightly) see it as an attempt to pervert the course of justice. As in most things in the law it is possible for all parties in a matter to be on the wrong side of it. If you want to come to the tribunal with "clean hands" then the best thing to do is make a record (not a copy) of the relevant documents and return then to the employer. Before going to the tribunal get your solicitor to subpoena the documents that you want - they will have to produce them and you have them without breaking your contract.