Second, an employee must be free of an employer's direction and control before the time can go unpaid. The other case involved a nursing home at which nurses were required to eat in a break room and answer the phone and pages from patients. In the latter case, the employer argued that since calls and pages were very infrequent because this was the graveyard shift, the nurses did not require to be paid. The Commission recognized that the calls were rare, but ruled that because the nurses were restricted to a break room so that they could not eat out or run errands, they had to be paid. If the nurses had been allowed total freedom for their lunch hour but had to carry pagers and the calls were rare, and they were given an adequate response time, TWC would probably have ruled in favor of the employer.
Unions exist for the welfare of their members, pure and simple.
This doesn't mean that laborers or cleaners are going to make more than doctors or pilots, but rather that union members earn much more than nonunionists in the same or comparable occupations. Unions also bargain for paid vacations, paid family leave, and educational leave. Also, union jobs are the best in the United States for pay equity between the races and the sexes. Because of that, you shouldn't hold a newly organized workplace to the same standards as a mature union in a highly organized workplace. But after they have gained further union experience, dignity on the job is what turns them into dedicated union members.