Our company's health and safety committee recently had an outside consultant come to our office to do First Aid and CPR training.  This was not a mandatory class for administrative people but we were encouraged to take the class as it would benefit the company and ourselves in emergency situations.The classes were during the work week from 3 p. m. to 7 p.m.

My question is, should non-exempt employees get paid overtime for this class or should it be considered personal time and the non-exempt employees are now having to use vacation time to account for time spent during the class.  Another option I was wondering about was, since it was encouraged to take it, non-exempt employees could charge time from 3 to 5 to the company and then consider it personal time after 5:00.  Is there a hard and fast rule on determining how non-exempt employees should show their time for this class?

Training is work as far as FLSA is concerned.  Can you demonstrate that this was an optional benefit and attendance was not required?

"Attendance at lectures, meetings, training programs and similar activities need not be counted as working time if the following four criteria are met: (a) Attendance is outside of the employee's regular working hours; (b) Attendance is in fact voluntary; (c) The course, lecture, or meeting is not directly related to the employee's job; and (d) The employee does not perform any productive work during such attendance."  from http://www.dol.gov/dol/allcfr/ESA/Title_29/Part_785/29CFR785.27.htm

 So from 3-5pm, they must be paid based on (a) alone and those hours would go into the overtime calculation.  And I would really question criterias (b) and (c) as to whether they should be paid from 5-7pm.

The DOL goes on in Section 785.28 to state "Attendance is not voluntary, of course, if it is required by the employer. It is not voluntary in fact if the employee is given to understand or led to believe that his present working conditions or the continuance of his employment would be adversely affected by
nonattendance."

I would also ask the goal of the employer of having this seminar during/after regular work hours. Did they want better attendance than doing so say on a Saturday?  Are they getting some type of a premium break on business insurance? If so, they may have made it less voluntary by having it (partially) during work hours.  And unless the non-paid totally voluntary training was communicated that way in advance to the employees, I would not try to argue it now...because it would take just one person making a wage claim stating that boss "told them they had to go" to cost more than paying them.

Thank you - this helped a great deal.  It was stated that it was mandatory for field personnel, however, others were encouraged to attend if they wanted to and it was even communicated that family members could attend as well.