Workplaces to see more spats over after-hours

By Ellen Wulfhorst

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Should an employee get paid for reading a BlackBerry at the dinner table, sending an office e-mail or posting a job-related blog at home?

A spat at ABC News over paying writers to check their BlackBerries on their own time recently raised the issue, and such a dispute marks the leading edge of a deluge of unresolved and potentially heated cases to come in the United States, experts say.

The growing technical ability to work remotely, combined the growth of work-related legal disputes, is raising "lots of smaller-scope issues of this kind," said John Thompson, an expert in wage and hour law at Fisher & Phillips in Atlanta.

"We've never seen anything like it. Just the question of what is work and what isn't is a practically endless question," he said. "It is going to drive to the surface all kinds of issues that nobody's ever thought of before."

At ABC, under a longstanding contract waiver, writers who sporadically checked their BlackBerries after hours did not incur time-and-a-half overtime pay.

The union, the Writers Guild of America, East, challenged the waiver when three new writers were hired, and the company responded by taking away all writers' BlackBerries, ABC said.

The waiver was quickly reinstated, said Jeffrey Schneider, senior vice president of ABC News.

"We're glad to be back to the status quo where people can still check their BlackBerries and stay read in without incurring time-and-a-half overtime, which turns very quickly into a very big bill for a news division like ours," he said.