Excerpts
COFFEE BREAKS, WAITING TIME & TRAVEL TIME ARE PART OF YOUR WORK HOURS
Here’s good news. Your employer has to pay you for your coffee breaks. But before you rush out from the office with this rose colored vision of your head and bum perched comfortably on that favorite leather couch of yours at Starbucks, sipping your favorite latte, there’s a catch. You only have 20 minutes! Any coffee break in excess of 20 minutes mean your employer is entitled to regard as non-work hours. And this includes the travel time to get to and from Starbucks. So, if you can squeeze all this in within 20 minutes, your coffee break is on the company!
If you are asked to wait around by your employer, be it to be on standby or on-call, this is regarded as working time, which means you must be paid for it. In regard to travel, if you’re asked to travel to another location from your normal place of work, you are entitled to be paid. For example, if you’re asked to fly from New Jersey to Miami to attend to a client, the time it takes to get you there is considered work time and you have to be paid for those hours.
WHAT ISN’T SEXUAL HARASSMENT
While having your boss grab you from behind and force his lips on yours is clearly sexual harassment, what about situations where you find yourself in a work culture where your male colleagues in particular use sexually coarse and vulgar language when referring to females and you’re a female?
The courts have stated that in order to constitute sexual harassment, the remarks uttered must be one that a reasonable person would find objectively and subjectively offensive. Doesn’t help much, does it? Let’s try and simply this criteria.
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