Court Opinion

ID: 9634019
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 12:14:40.859521+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:08:48.191389
License: Public Domain

HALL, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part:
I join in the opinion except as to Rutti’s claim for compensation for the required postliminary PDT transmission, which I would also affirm. I believe the time *1100spent engaging in PDT transmissions was de minimis.
There is no dispute regarding the process required for transmission: the task involved connecting the PDT to a modem, scrolling down a menu on the PDT screen, and selecting the “transmit” option to initiate uploading. No technician has contested that this process took any more than a couple of minutes. As the district court noted, 66 of the 70 purported class members stated total PDT transmission activity took them five minutes or less daily, and the remaining four stated the transmission took them less than ten minutes daily. Even the technician claiming to be paid fifteen minutes daily for his PDT transmission acknowledged that the process actually only took him a total of one to two minutes. Only Rutti claimed that his PDT transmission would take up to fifteen minutes to complete, which he attributed to the delays caused by transmission failures.
Also undisputed is the fact that LoJack clearly established policies for technicians to follow in the event of transmission difficulties. Technicians were required to notify LoJack of errors, were provided technical support, and were instructed on how to set their PDT to automatically transmit overnight. Rutti followed none of these procedures. He did acknowledge, however, that if he waited until 10 p.m., he had no difficulty transmitting the data.
While the majority is correct that Lindow did not establish a per se rule that ten minutes or less is de minimis, the majority overlooks the facts of that case. In Lindow, the court acknowledged that the range of time spent in the activity was five to fifteen minutes, with an average time of seven to eight minutes, yet found that time to be de minimis. Lindow v. United States, 738 F.2d 1057, 1059-60. Here, the vast majority of purported class members state the transmission takes five minutes or less, and likely only one to two minutes. A postliminary activity requiring “only a few seconds or minutes of work beyond the scheduled working hours” is de minimis. Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co., 328 U.S. 680, 692, 66 S.Ct. 1187, 90 L.Ed. 1515 (1946).1 Only one person; Rut-ti, claims that the transmission takes up to fifteen minutes, and only if there are transmission difficulties. Other cases, relying on Lindow, have also found ranges of five to fifteen minutes de minimis. See, e.g., Bobo v. United States, 37 Fed.Cl. 690, 702 (1997) (five to fifteen minutes de minimis even where activity was a principal duty) aff'd Bobo v. United States, 136 F.3d 1465 (Fed.Cir.1998).
Those cases, like the district court here, rely heavily on the administrative difficulty involved in recording the time spent. While acknowledging this difficulty, the majority points to the example of one technician who testified he was paid for his PDT transmissions at the rate of fifteen minutes per day, implying that LoJack could simply “extend” that practice to all technicians. That technician, however, admitted that the transmission only took him one to two minutes daily, but that LoJack paid only in fifteen minute increments, so *1101he rounded up. The technician also admitted that he knew company policy required him to clock out from work each day at 5 p.m., whereas the fifteen minutes he recorded were after 5 p.m. The record does not indicate that LoJack approved, or even was aware of, this technician’s practice. This example, rather than supporting the majority’s conclusion, highlights the difficulty involved in recording such small periods of time.
The majority is correct to note that the technicians must also check back to see that the data was uploaded successfully, but this requires only a few seconds to do. Rutti testified at his deposition that he would spend the time when the data was transmitting watching television or making a sandwich. And if he set-up the PDT transmission to occur automatically overnight, as LoJack allowed, the transmission time could be spent sleeping. This hardly satisfies the “engaged to wait” standard to be compensable as required by Owens v. Local No. 169, Ass’n of W. Pulp & Paper Workers, 971 F.2d 347, 350 (9th Cir.1992).
Finally, as Rutti argues, the PDT transmission took longer than a couple of minutes only when the transmission required multiple attempts to be successful. Even allowing for the possibility of multiple transmission attempts, each new attempt would add only a few seconds of time to click “transmit” again, and the employees’ time between transmission attempts and during actual uploading would be spent on personal activities. As noted above, however, LoJack established procedures for technicians to follow if they experienced technical difficulties, and required them to report any such failures. Rutti admits he never followed procedure to notify LoJack of his difficulties, nor did he set up his PDT transmission to occur automatically. LoJack only required its employees to perform a transmission it believed to be de minimis. If properly performed, as the vast majority of purported class members testified, the total transmission would likely require under five minutes. In Forrester v. Roth’s IGA Foodliner, 646 F.2d 413, 414 (9th Cir.1981), this court held that “where an employer has no knowledge that an employee is engaging in overtime work and that employee fails to notify the employer or deliberately prevents the employer from acquiring knowledge of the overtime work, the employer’s failure to pay for the overtime hours is not a violation of [the FLSA].” Rutti’s deliberate actions in violating company procedure that would have notified LoJack of the problems he experienced, or, in the case of the automatic transmission, would have prevented the difficulties, cannot now be held against LoJack.
Thus, even if the transmission is construed to be a principal activity, it is still not compensable because it is de minimis. And even if the transmission were not de minimis, LoJack is still entitled to summary judgment if Rutti failed to inform LoJack of the time he spent on the transmissions beyond a de minimis time. I conclude that this is precisely the type of activity the Portal-to-Portal Act and the de minimis rule were designed to reach. I respectfully dissent from that portion of the opinion which concludes otherwise.

. The majority cites heavily from the Anderson opinion to support its policy discussion of compensable time and its interpretation of the scope of the de minimis rule. See Opinion at n. 10 & 11. I separately object to this reliance. Congress overruled the Anderson decision by passing the Portal-to-Portal Act, which modified the FLSA, less than one year after the decision was reached in order to vitiate the very reasoning on which the majority now relies. See Carter v. Panama Canal Co., 463 F.2d 1289, 1293-94 (D.C.Cir.1972). It is the Portal-to-Portal Act that excludes compensation for commuting and preliminary and postliminary activities. See id.; see also 29 U.S.C. § 254. Thus, the reliance on the Anderson case should be restricted to its creation of the de minimis exception.