Details of Seattle Minimum Wage Law – Mobile Employees

[skeeter]

Does anyone know the following detail? Lets say we are talking about a landscaping business with administrative functions (accounting, payroll, asset storage, etc) in Kent and customers are located all over King County. Would the employer have to pay employees the Seattle minimum wage while working on a client in Seattle? Or can the employer pay below the Seattle minimum wage since the company is physically located outside city limits? Let’s assume for this example the employee arrives at work in Kent, “clocks in,” then gets in a truck and drives to the customer site.

My guess is the employer will be required to pay the Seattle min wage if the customer is located in Seattle, but I’m not sure. That’s going to be interesting because the pool of employees will all want to serve the clients inside the Seattle city limits as opposed to a job in, say, Bellevue or Redmond.

On the flip side, if the business has administrative functions in the city of Seattle, but customers are located both inside and outside of the city, my guess is the employer would have to pay the employee the Seattle min wage while working on a customer in the city of Seattle, but could pay less if the customer is located outside the city of Seattle.

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[Kimberley]

This will likely be determined by the physical address of the Company.

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[vogel]

According to the ordinance, this will depend on where the work is actually performed. Employers of mobile employees will be required to track how much time is worked in Seattle and compensate those hours according to city requirements.

Employers will need to figure out whether it makes more sense to manage the administrative burden of where each hour of work is performed or whether it’s just easier to apply the higher rates everywhere.

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