Idaho Law Blog

By Lane V. Erickson, Attorney

Both Idaho law and applicable Federal Law require that an employer pay an employee for all hours worked. Sometimes it is clear what is considered on duty time.  However, sometimes it is not.  In Idaho, hours worked does not include:

• time to be spent by an employee travelling to and from the workplace, in productive work preparation, changing clothes prior to and after a work shift, taking showers, attaining and returning work tools and equipment, when a business, industry, plant, mine, factory or workplace has a custom or practice of treating such time as non-compensable time;

By Lane V. Erickson, Attorney

In Idaho, employers have a duty to protect others from the foreseeable harmful conduct of its employees.  The two types of cases that are usually brought against an employer when an employee engages in intentionally harmful conduct to others are negligent hiring and negligent supervision.

In the negligent hiring area Idaho has few cases.  One worth discussing is Doe v. Garcia, et al., 131 Idaho 578 (1998).  In Doe, the employee worked for a hospital as a respiratory therapist.  However, the hospital, in hiring the employee, failed to request the employee’s personnel file from his previous employer.  In failing to obtain this personnel file, the hospital failed to learn that the employee had been fired from his previous job because he had sexually molested a patient at his previous job.  While working for the hospital, the employee admitted to a staff member the reason for his previous termination.  However, the hospital took no further action.  While working, the employee treated Doe, who was a minor and developed a friendship with him.  The employee was later discharged by the hospital for encouraging under-aged employees to consume alcohol.  After his termination, the employee sexually molested Doe.  Doe filed suit against the hospital alleging that it was negligent in hiring the employee.  The district court ruled in favor of the hospital.  Doe appealed.  The Idaho Supreme Court reversed and remanded the matter to the district court for further proceedings stating that a genuine issue existed as to whether the hospital was liable and whether it should have foreseen that the employee would use his position within the hospital that would lead to the molestation of Doe.

By Lane V. Erickson, Attorney

In Idaho the limits of using off-duty conduct in an employment decision are mostly controlled by either an employment agreement or the “at will” doctrine described above.  However, some exceptions to this may still apply.  Using social media as an example illustrates these narrow exceptions.  While none of the incidents reported below occurred in Idaho they likely will in the future.  As reported:

May 25, 2010, Brixx Wood Fired Pizza waitress Ashley Johnson was pretty fired up about the couple that lingered three hours over lunch, made her work an hour past her quitting time – and then left her only a $5 tip.  So Johnson, 22, did the 21st century equivalent of griping to the kitchen staff (or the bartender down the street): She vented on Facebook. “Thanks for eating at Brixx,” she wrote, “you cheap piece of —- camper.” (For the record, the $5 tip was 17 percent of the customers’ bill.)