An employer of an emergency response service required its service employees to be on call every weekend, as they might be called to report within 10 minutes. While on call, employees were not permitted to leave their homes, as the employer's contact was to their home phones. Also, employees were not permitted to drink alcohol on the weekends, because of their potential on-call duties. The employer did not pay for on-call weekends, and the employees sued. What are the issues, and what should the court decide?
What could the employer have done differently to avoid incurring liability for compensable time and perhaps overtime?