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40 U.S.F. L. Rev. 217 (2005-2006)
Reforming the Fair Labor Standards Act: Recognizing On-Call Time as a Distinct Category of Compensable Work

handle is hein.journals/usflr40 and id is 225 raw text is: Reforming the Fair Labor Standards Act: Recognizing On-Call Time as a Distinct Category of Compensable Work By LOREN SCHWARTZ* IN FEBRUARY 1982, Houston Northwest Medical Center (North- west) gave Frederick Bright a promotion and a leash.' After working as a biomedical equipment repair technician for a little over a year, Bright was promoted to the position of senior biomedical equipment repair technician.2 His new position required him to carry a pager during all off-duty hours and subjected him to the following three re- strictions: (1) he was required to always be reachable by the pager; (2) he could not be intoxicated or impaired to the degree that he could not work on medical equipment; and (3) he had to always be in a position where he could be at the hospital within approximately twenty minutes of being paged.3 For eleven months straight, Frederick Bright was on-call.4 Not just on holidays and not just on the weekends, Frederick Bright was on-call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for eleven months straight.5 Although he could go home after work, home was about as far as he could go.6 Along with his promotion, Frederick Bright was issued a twenty-minute electronic leash so that no matter what he was doing at a given time, he had to be able to leave at a moment's notice and be close enough to the hospital that he could get there within twenty minutes.7 For eleven months, Bright could not so much as go * I would like to thank my parents for all their years of care and support, Professor Maria Ontiveros for working with me on initial drafts of this Comment, and my editor, Jason Horst, for his hard work in bringing this Comment to publication. 1. Bright v. Houston Nw. Med. Ctr. Survivor, Inc., 934 F.2d 671, 673 (5th Cir. 1991). 2. Id. 3. Id. 4. Id. at 673, 679. Being on-call means that the employee is not actively working on his employer's premises although he must be available to report to his employer if so re- quested. See infra Part I.A. 5. Bright, 934 F.2d at 673, 679. 6. Id. at 673. 7. Id.

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