Trust Economics

An article in the US National Law Journal details cases of staff from various companies (including AT&T Inc. and Cigna Corp.) who believe that they should still receive pay for time spent waiting for their work computers to boot-up. They may be resting on the argument that they find other work to do while they wait for their machines to become useable (e.g. making phonecalls and arranging their work calendar), although the defendants in these cases argue that in these situations employees instead engage in “non-work activities”.
A concern that is raised from a Trust Economics perspective is that this is a simple case of computer infrastructure management decisions (specifically power-management policies) affecting user productivity in an ambiguous way. It may not be too much of a leap to imagine similar situations where information security infrastructure can have a bearing on an employee’s ability to use their workstation (e.g. waiting for virus scans of externally-connected devices, configuring security software on a machine at start-up etc.).