CHICAGO – Jeffrey Allen would answer his work BlackBerry during Thanksgiving dinner, during his son's soccer match, on any number of Saturday afternoons.
The phone would buzz with work-related texts, e-mails and calls from the time he woke until he headed to bed — and, with it always in reach, he would respond.
"I just saw it as part of the job," said Allen, 51, a Chicago police sergeant.
But it was not a part of the job he was paid for, Allen alleges in a class-action lawsuit against the city of Chicago filed five years ago that heads to trial this month. He and about 50 officers who have joined the suit seek overtime pay for off-duty hours spent monitoring and responding to work e-mails and phone calls on their company-issued mobile devices.
Anyone familiar with the ping of a late-night e-mail, a weekend call from a boss or a mid-dinner glance at a text message has felt the inescapability of work in the age of smartphones. But while constant connectedness has become the norm, it has also become a source of overtime litigation — and attorneys say that could increase under a proposal from the Obama administration to make millions more salaried Americans eligible for overtime, including many in managerial positions.
"As managers, they are more likely to be checking in during off hours," said Phillip Schreiber, a Chicago-based employment lawyer at Holland & Knight who represents businesses and is not involved in the police suit.
The new overtime rule proposed by the Labor Department last month would raise to $50,440 the minimum salary an employee must make before he or she can be classified as exempt from overtime, which would be up from $23,660. The government estimates that would extend overtime pay to nearly 5 million salaried workers in a range of professions, from store managers to staff accountants, who currently are exempt under "white collar" provisions. The salary threshold doesn't affect certain workers, including teachers, outside sales representatives and certain hourly computer professionals.
More overtime-eligible workers means greater risk of litigation and greater need for employers to establish clear policies mandating that such employees not field work-related communication on their mobile devices when they're off the clock, unless they're authorized by a supervisor, Schreiber said.