Opinion ID: 218262
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Calculation of Compensable Time

Text: Having determined that the time the employees spend donning and doffing at the beginning and the end of the work shifts is compensable, we turn to consider the amount of time that employees spend completing these activities. In order to calculate the time that the employees spend donning and doffing, the district court considered the expert testimony of Dr. Davis and Dr. Radwin. According to Mountaire, the district court erred in rejecting the results of Dr. Davis's study and largely accepting Dr. Radwin's conclusions regarding the calculation of compensable time. We find no merit in Mountaire's argument. The district court clearly stated its reasons for rejecting Dr. Davis's study results. The district court found that Dr. Davis's study was an academic ... exercise that did not reflect the employees' normal donning and doffing process. Perez, 610 F.Supp.2d at 512. The district court also observed that Dr. Davis did not randomly select the participants for his study, but permitted Mountaire supervisors to choose the participants and to exclude any members of the plaintiff class. Of additional concern to the district court, Dr. Davis's study did not take into account the realities of the employees' work because it was conducted in a conference room where all the required gear was provided to the employees on a table. Id. Based on these findings, we conclude that the district court did not abuse its discretion in refusing to rely on the results of Dr. Davis's study. In contrast, the district court described Dr. Radwin's study as a practical real-time evaluation of the donning and doffing process. Id. Dr. Radwin's study considered the time that employees spent walking in congested hallways and to various locations to obtain the protective gear. The district court found that the study participants were randomly selected and were recorded on videotape under actual working conditions. The district court therefore relied on the results of Dr. Radwin's study to calculate the compensable time. Mountaire raises two objections concerning Dr. Radwin's study. First, Mountaire asserts that Dr. Radwin erred in beginning his measurement of the donning process when the employees acquired their first piece of equipment, and in ending his measurements when the employees released their last piece of equipment. According to Mountaire, Dr. Radwin should not have included in his measurements the time period between the employees' acquisition of the gear and their donning of the gear, and the time period between their doffing and their release of the last piece of gear. The First Circuit addressed this issue in Tum v. Barber Foods, Inc., 360 F.3d 274, 283 (1st Cir.2004), rev'd on other grounds, IBP, Inc. v. Alvarez, 546 U.S. 21, 126 S.Ct. 514, 163 L.Ed.2d 288 (2005). There, the court approved jury instructions defining the donning process as including the employees' acts in obtaining the gear, and the doffing process as including the time necessary to place the gear in a designated bin or locker. Id. at 282-83. We further observe that the First Circuit's holding on this issue in Tum is consistent with the position of the Secretary of Labor. [12] See DOL Wage & Adv. Mem. No.2006-2 n.1 (May 31, 2006). We conclude that the First Circuit's holding and the Secretary's position are persuasive here, because Mountaire controlled the location of the employees' donning and doffing at the plant, and these acts are necessary to the employees' ability to do their jobs. The employees obtained various pieces of gear at different locations selected by Mountaire. Mountaire provided clean smocks on racks located in congested hallways, and the employees stored their other protective gear in lockers provided by the company. Employees donned their gear beside their lockers, in bathrooms, in the production area, or in the busy hallways as they walked to their workstations. Because of these conditions, the employees were not always able to don their protective gear as soon as they obtained their smocks. At the end of the work shift, the employees doffed their gear at various designated locations within the plant and placed most of their protective gear in their lockers. The employees deposited their soiled smocks in hampers that Mountaire placed in the hallways. We conclude that, based on these facts, the district court properly found that the time spent by the employees after acquiring their protective gear but before donning it, and after doffing the gear until fully discarding it, is compensable. Mountaire raises a separate argument, however, concerning Dr. Radwin's method of calculating the time expended by the employees. According to Mountaire, Dr. Radwin improperly calculated the total compensable time by adding the mean times of each activity. Mountaire asserts that compensable time instead should have been calculated by adding together the minimum amounts of time expended by the best-performing employee in completing each activity. We find no merit in this argument because such a method of calculation would not account for the fact that workers of different ages and states of well-being, with varying degrees of agility, are engaged in the performance of these activities. Thus, a calculation based on the summation of mean times provides a more accurate representation of the amount of time that employees working at the plant actually spend donning and doffing. We therefore conclude that the district court did not err in relying on the mean times provided by Dr. Radwin, and we now proceed to calculate the compensable time based on the results of Dr. Radwin's study. Based on the district court's rationale, after adjusting for outliers, the total compensable time for donning and doffing was seventeen minutes. [13] From this period of seventeen minutes, we must exclude the amount of time required for mealtime donning and doffing that the employees are precluded from recovering by our decision in Sepulveda. According to Dr. Radwin's study, the mean time for mealtime donning and doffing is 6.796 minutes. Therefore, the total time spent donning and doffing at the beginning and end of the workday equals 10.204 minutes.