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Incentive not to take breaks

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M

mrwiggley

Guest
What is the name of your state?

California.

Up until about two weeks ago, I worked in the call center of a semi-large ISP, in their technical support department.

The support department has an "incentive system" in place that allows the employees to be paid up to $1.50 per hour more than their regualar hourly wage. It basically works like this: if you stop your phone from recieving calls ("make busy") for 10% of the day, you earn 80% of your incenitve, or if you made busy for 20% of your day, you would earn 60% of your incentive.

Each employee is allotted two 15 minute breaks however, 30 minutes of your phone being made busy is a little over 13% off your incentive. They DO arbitrarily credit each technician for 30 minutes of breaks, however the problem arises when your are having a hard time getting good a incentive rating, as I was.

Let's say for example that every day I take two 15 minute breaks (duing which time my phone is busy) and my phone is busy while I'm doing other taks enough that my daily average is 78%. If I didn't take my two fifteen minute breaks, I would have earned over 91% of my incentive.

Recently, my incentive has been averaging around 78%. What lead up to my leaving the company was that I was put on probation for having poor incentive and a few other minor issues. I was told that if I didn't earn at least 90% incentive or higher on a consistent basis, I wouldn't be there any longer than two weeks. When my boss brought me into his office to explain to me what was going on and to sign the paperwork. This seems like an incentive not to take breaks, and seems like it might be at least legally questionable.

Additionally, logs of one's phone activities cannot be generated by the telephone system, so the numbers listed in the "incentive report" have no way of being validated so they have no (apparrently) legal method of proving that the numbers on those incentive reports are correct.

I wonder if this is a violation of some labor law some where?
 
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Beth3

Senior Member
Most likely, it's perfectly legal. With one or two exceptions, no States mandate employers provide breaks for adults (18+ years of age) and federal law does not require them. If they want to "incent" employees to skip breaks, they can do so. Plus, they can caluate commission/incentive pay using any formula they wish, so there would be no requirement for the employer to demonstrate their method is valid.

I don't believe CA is one of those few States that require breaks be provided but you can call CA's Labor Board to find out for certain.
 

cbg

I'm a Northern Girl
Actually, CA is one of the states that requires breaks. But they aren't saying that the employee can't take breaks. They're setting up a standard under which the employee has decided they are disinclined to take breaks. Therefore, as far as I can see, no laws have been violated.
 

Beth3

Senior Member
Thanks for the clarification, cbg. Of all the 50 States, I probably should have assumed that CA would be one of the extremely few that require breaks be provided.
 
M

mrwiggley

Guest
Actually, the big condition of the probation was that my incentive would be 90% or higher on a consistent basis.

That coupled with the fact that if I had stopped taking breaks my incentive would have been above the 90% range and I would not have been fired seems illegal.

It seems that they are, without directly saying it, telling me to stop taking my breaks and making it a condition for employment at the company.
 

Beth3

Senior Member
I'm curious. mrwiggley, do your co-workers take breaks and still find a way to achieve 90% or higher commission? If they do, then the basis for your argument is moot.
 

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