Timekeeping software favors management.

• Position: Hourly Workers

Timekeeping software for managing employee hours could undermine compliance with wage and hour laws, maintains a study in the Yale Journal of Law and Technology, coauthored by Zev Eigen of Littler Mendelson, Melville, N.Y.; Charlotte S. Alexander, assistant professor of legal studies at Georgia State University, Atlanta; and Elizabeth Tippett, assistant professor in the School of Law at the University of Oregon, Eugene.

The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 is the primary Federal law that governs workers' wages and hours, and its basic minimum wage and overtime protections remain largely intact in the statute's original form. The regulations for maintaining employee time records last were updated in 1987, when time sheets largely were hand-recorded.

However, the technology to record workers' hours has changed dramatically, including scans of an employee's fingerprint or radio frequency ID badge, (commonly known as RFID), that can record time to the millisecond.

"Without updated record-keeping rules, software makers compete over providing features that automatically modify employee timesheets or that make it really easy for supervisors to make changes.

"Employees may not even know that their timesheets have been modified," notes Tippett, the study's lead author and faculty co-director of the Conflict & Dispute Resolution Master's Program.

Findings include software functionality that automatically rounds employee time and deducts breaks from employee timesheets, both of which could work against employees in the aggregate. The study also...