Dive Brief:

• Federal labor regulators are looking into changing the rules that determine if certain employees should be compensated for answering emails, text and phone calls when those workers are technically "off duty."
• With the trend towards a 24/7 work week, employers increasingly expect employees with mobile phones and laptops to always be on call. But for workers in lower-paid groups that would qualify for overtime, including clerical, bookkeeping and secretarial positions, that time may be compensable if the government updates its "de minimis" rule, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. 
• The Department of Labor's rule allows employers to "disregard infrequent and trivial amounts of work that cannot practically be recorded for payroll purposes." If the rule is updated, it could mean employers will have to start collecting data on and paying overtime for those tasks when done away from the office.

Dive Insight:

“They expect it, but they don’t compensate their employees for it,” Darren Weiss, a labor and employment lawyer for Baltimore, Md.-based law firm Offit Kurman, told the Post-Gazette.

Also, asking to be paid overtime for such seeminginly minor intrusions is easier said than done, says another legal expert. “From the employee’s perspective, you could look cheap or something like that, if you’re looking to be paid for every minute ... Do you start to round up every 30 seconds?” Martin Saunders, an employment lawyer for Canonsburg law firm Steptoe & Johnson, told the Post-Gazette.

This summer, the DOL said it would gather feedback from the public on the notion of updating its wage and record-keeping standards rule for work performed off-the-clock on electronic devices, says the article. The critical challenge will be how to track that data, but with today's technology, if the rule changes, there will be vendors offering effective ways to do it.