Switched has a new home! Huffpost Tech.

Click here to visit the new home of Switched!

Hot on HuffPost Tech:

See More Stories
AOL Tech

Should You Get Paid for Checking Your BlackBerry at Home?

by Terrence O'Brien on June 27, 2008 at 11:30 AM

Is Checking Your Blackberry Billable Work?A fight has broken out at the ABC News Room over what constitutes overtime. The Writers Guild and ABC have had a long standing contractual agreement that writers would not incur the time-and-a-half overtime wage for simply checking their BlackBerrys while at home, but a batch of new writers recently tried to challenge this agreement and demanded compensation for this after-hours activity.

Of course, management wasn't fond of the idea of paying writers when they weren't writing and simply offered to take the BlackBerrys off their hands. The Writers Guild and the new employees quickly backed down.

However the confrontation does highlight a growing issue in the work place -- where does work end? And what should you be getting paid for? Does simply checking your e-mail warrant billing your employer? Probably not, but we're big advocates of leaving work at the office (or on your dedicated work desk at home), during whatever your designated work week happens to be. Anything more than a few minutes of replying to important correspondence seems like perfectly billable time to us. What do you think? Should you get paid for checking your e-mail or BlackBerrys outside of the office? [Source: Reuters]

Tags: office, work, workplace

Comments

2

HuffPost AOL Social News Most Popular