Booting up and shutting down computers
Massive layoffs of 260 workers at a call center in Moundsville, West Virginia, were announced in 2013. In Amherst, Ohio, TeleTech announced plans to close a call center that employed 585 workers in 2010, but saved 400 jobs after the outside contract was renewed. But in 2014, another 200 jobs were sliced from that same center due to “operational changes within the clients’ business” as the company told Ohio-based newspaper, The Morning Journal, in March.
TeleTech was also hit with a class action lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio in August, which claimed that an estimated 1,500 TeleTech employees were affected by allegations of wage theft over a three-year period. The lawsuit cites the company’s refusal to pay overtime, and other labor law violations when employees of the TeleTech@Home branch were not paid for the time it takes for computers to boot up and shut down.
A similar lawsuit filed in 2004 against TeleTech that represented more than 900 on-site employees from multiple call centers sat in litigation for years. The lawsuit went into arbitration in 2007 and the court case closed in 2010, but the settlement amount was undisclosed.
Court documents revealed claims of various off-the-clock but on-site duties such as waiting for daily seat assignments, booting up and shutting down computers, in addition to being forced to work through breaks and lunch periods by supervisors.
Attorneys also argued the company purposely refused to use an existing electronic swipe security system that employees used to enter and exit the building as the timecard method. Instead, an online system collected information on hours worked and until the employee logged in at the company computer, they were not compensated before and after shifts, documents show.