Windows start-up and shutdown times result in lawsuits

By Sam Varghese
Saturday, 22 November 2008 05:09

Opinion and Analysis

Windows takes so long to boot up and shut down that some employers have started cutting pay for the 15 to 30 minutes that employees take to boot up their workstations  at the start of the day and then shut them down when their shifts end.
According to a report in the US National Law Journal, several companies such as AT&T, Cigna Corp and UnitedHealth Group, have been sued by employees who claim they were not paid for this time their machines took to boot up and shut down.

The plaintiffs' lawyer, Mark Thierman, was quoted as saying that when those minutes were added up they amounted to a substantial amount of money, given that the employees in question were mostly on the minimum wage.

He said that while the booting up is going on, employees would normally be attending to other work-related tasks.

But Richard Rosenblatt, a lawyer who is defending managements in several such suits, was quoted as saying that employees generally started their PCs and then attended to non-work tasks.

Cigna Corp has been sued in California by hundreds of customer service representatives at call centres over such claims.

The same thing has happened to AT&T and Bellsouth Corp in Georgia. A third set of cases has been filed in Missouri against UnitedHealth Group by employees who work from home, the NLJ report says.

Incidentally, GNU/Linux doesn't take even half that amount of time to boot up and shut down. PCs running GNU/Linux can be left running safely overnight as they generally only need rebooting when a major software change like a kernel upgrade is done.