Being early is usually a good thing. Being required to arrive early and then waiting outside a locked workplace raises an important wage and hour question.

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TL;DR: A federal appeals court revived a grocery employee’s unpaid-wage claims after she alleged that employees had to arrive fifteen minutes before their listed shifts but sometimes couldn’t enter or clock in. Required waiting time can be paid time even before productive work begins. The court also declined to dismiss the recurring fifteen-minute waits as too trivial to count.

📄 Read the court’s decision.

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The schedule said 5:00. The reporting requirement said 4:45.

The employee worked as a grocery clerk and stocker, with opening shifts listed as 5:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., four days a week. According to her complaint, however, the employer required opening employees to arrive fifteen minutes early, a requirement that ultimately persuaded the appeals court to revive her claims.

Sometimes the opening manager hadn’t arrived to unlock the store. The employees allegedly waited outside until the manager showed up, usually at the listed start time or later. The time clocks were inside, so they couldn’t record the wait.

The employee alleged that this happened about once a week, leaving fifteen minutes unpaid each time. She also alleged that some of those minutes should have been paid at overtime rates.

She sued under the FLSA and New York law. The trial court dismissed her unpaid-time claims, reasoning that the waiting occurred before her principal work activities and fell outside the FLSA’s pay requirements.

Ready to work, but the employer couldn’t let her in

Does the absence of stocking or customer service make the waiting unpaid? The Second Circuit’s answer turned on why the employee was there.

Federal law generally excludes certain activities before or after an employee’s principal work activities. But the majority explained that an employee required to report at a particular time, ready to work, can be entitled to pay when circumstances beyond the employee’s control prevent work from starting.

Someone who voluntarily arrives early presents a different situation. Here, accepting the complaint’s allegations as true, the employee had no option to arrive at 5:00 instead of 4:45.

The court therefore restored the federal and state unpaid-time claims and sent them back for further proceedings. That gives the employee a chance to prove her allegations; it does not award her back pay.

Fifteen minutes a week wasn’t automatically too little to count

The employer also argued that the waiting periods were too brief and infrequent to require payment. The appeals court declined to resolve that argument in the employer’s favor based on the complaint alone.

The court considered whether the time could practically be recorded, how much accumulated, and how regularly it occurred. It couldn’t conclude that the alleged weekly fifteen-minute waits were too trivial to count or too difficult to track.

Employers should compare actual reporting instructions with payroll practices, including what happens when employees obey those instructions but cannot reach the time clock.

Three gaps worth checking before the next opening shift

A listed start time doesn’t erase an earlier reporting requirement

The alleged fifteen-minute arrival rule drove this result. Review what managers actually require, rather than assuming the posted schedule fully describes when employees must be ready to work.

A locked time clock needs a way to correct the record

The employees allegedly couldn’t clock in because they couldn’t enter. Give employees a practical way to report required waiting time and have payroll assess and correct missing time.

The federal rule may not be the whole answer

Before treating waiting time as unpaid, check whether applicable state law requires payment even where federal law might not. That includes checking whether the state recognizes a federal-style exception for amounts of time considered too trivial to count.

A manager with the keys can control when the door opens. That doesn’t necessarily control when paid time begins.