When should an employee be paid?

Malthusian

silvercar wrote: »

I'm actually really surprised at the amount of people who accept clock watching as normal office behaviour.

Blame the managers for creating an inefficient environment where the 10 minutes it takes the employees to turn on their computers has a material impact on the business. And for poor IT management. They have the power to do something about this, the guys on minimum wage don't.

This is a very simple problem which could be fixed either by keeping the PCs up to date and capable of doing the job they're required for, or failing that something as simple as whoever is responsible for opening up the office turning all the PCs on. Both of these are much better options than asking employees to contribute an extra 15 minutes of their day for free which they will quite justly resent. Say there's 10 employees in the office, that's two and a half hours of time lost every day.

If you were working on a building site and a crane broke down, would you expect all the workmen to work an extra two hours a day unpaid carrying all the bricks by hand up the construction site, or would you expect the employer to replace the crane? Or if they can't, accept that the project will take much longer? The employees are responsible for turning up at the agreed time, it's the employer's responsibility to ensure they have the tools they need to produce the level of output it wants.

[Deleted User]

I don't know but I'd be trying to find out what's behind the new start time request. Eg has there been a complaint of no answer at 9.01am objectively to understand.

Real £7.20 jobs are easy enough to come by.

dcouponzzzz

*~Zephyr~* wrote: »

Amongst the decently salaried yes, it would be forwned upon. It's all part of the deal, including some unpaid overtime. But for the hourly paid, it's a different matter. To expect someone to work for literally nothing is not fair.

But they're not working, they're preparing to work

dcouponzzzz

Malthusian wrote: »

Blame the managers for creating an inefficient environment where the 10 minutes it takes the employees to turn on their computers has a material impact on the business. And for poor IT management. They have the power to do something about this, the guys on minimum wage don't.

This is a very simple problem which could be fixed either by keeping the PCs up to date and capable of doing the job they're required for, or failing that something as simple as whoever is responsible for opening up the office turning all the PCs on. Both of these are much better options than asking employees to contribute an extra 15 minutes of their day for free which they will quite justly resent. Say there's 10 employees in the office, that's two and a half hours of time lost every day.

If you were working on a building site and a crane broke down, would you expect all the workmen to work an extra two hours a day unpaid carrying all the bricks by hand up the construction site, or would you expect the employer to replace the crane? Or if they can't, accept that the project will take much longer? The employees are responsible for turning up at the agreed time, it's the employer's responsibility to ensure they have the tools they need to produce the level of output it wants.

It's likely the requirement to shut down at the end of the day was put in place by IT to prevent security and performance patches sitting in pending status, and clogging the memory usage with background processes.

10 minutes at the start of the day to prevent the occasional 1-2 hour complete shut down of an individuals workstation during peak hours sounds fair to me. My place of work doesn't enforce shut downs at the moment and you'd be surprised how often the staff reporting to me spend fixing/rebooting/manually updating.

undaunted

Chucky1234 wrote: »

Yeah I agree with this. With regards to shutting down - the monitors have an orange light for standby mode when we shut down and have to manually press the button on the monitors to turn them off standby. The employer has stated these must be turned off so we have to wait for it to fully shut down before turning the monitor off standby.

? If I turn off the monitor I'm sat in front of the pc will still be doing whatever it's doing in the background. Is switching the monitor off really going to send your pc into standby?


Fair is fair in my opinion - if the employer is happy to kiss goodbye to the odd 5 minutes here & there in return then fair enough. If they want it all one way & for nothing I think you all ought to stand together and say no.

robin_banks

getmore4less wrote: »

It is a minimum wage issue.

An employer can decide which working time is paid an unpaid as long as they don't break the minimum wage regulations.


Work time is reasonable well defined, typically as soon as you are doing things required for the job.

that would be from the time you clock in(if clocking in is required) or start doing things like turning on computers.

You tot up all your working time and see if you are over min wage fr what they actually pay.

If your presence is required, as it would be for the joy of a team meeting or locking up then you should be remunerated accordingly.