Tri-town wages questioned

AREA — A Paris resident has charged that Tri-Town Rescue is dodging the law by not paying its on-call employees minimum wage, but a Tri-Town rep says that it is completely legal.

State labor officials find the ambulance service's process to be acceptable, but say that, in one instance, the federal government might feel differently.

"Tri-Town Rescue has been employing people for the last year to work for $3 and hour," said a resident of Paris, who said that he wanted to remain anonymous because "I don't want my name on it."

On-call ambulance drivers are currently paid $3 per hour while waiting for calls to come in.

The resident said that he was "baffled" by the practice, and called it "illegal."

Lenny McKenna, a labor inspector for the Maine Department of Labor, says that, generally speaking, on-call employees don't need to be paid at all.

"They don't have to pay them anything to be on-call," said McKenna. "A lot of them do pay, as an incentive to be on-call."

However, said McKenna, some employers ask their employees to be physically present while on-call. This is when employers cross the legal line.

"Now they're controlling them. If they say come into the office and wait for the phone to ring, that's working," "said McKenna. "That's the same as if Walmart said, come in and wait around, because we might need a cashier."

McKenna said that the issue "comes up all the time. I probably get 10 of these calls a day."

John Hammel, a representative of Tri-Town, says that the service does not require those employees to come into the station.

"The drivers do get $3 to be on-call," he said. "They're not required to be at the station, they're required to be on-call."

However, Hammel said that, in order to be sure of a quick response time to emergency situations,  the drivers are required to be relatively close to the station.

"They have to be within five minutes, or five miles," he said. "I'm not quite sure which."

Hammel said that, in most cases, this means that an ambulance driver can be on-call while at home, as most of them live very close to the station.

"We try not to do that [have drivers who live outside of the allowable radius]," said Hammel. "We only have one driver who, I think, might live further away."

Hammel said that the individual was happy with the arrangement. "That would be his own choice," said Hammel.

Situations like that, where an employee is not required to come in, but might be required to leave his home and hang around the neighborhood of the station, fall into a grey area of the law, says Division Director Anne Harriman, of the Department of Labor.

"The state would find it acceptable," said Harriman. "It isn't something we would address because we don't have anything that would specifically cover that situation."

She added that the US Department of Labor would probably have jurisdiction in a case like that. "I know that they've got regulations that address employees being on call," she said. "It's just a guess, but they might find that to be unreasonable, to have to leave home to be near the workplace."