A student loan servicing company with offices in the Denver metro area should have paid its call-center representatives for the time spent logging in to their workstations at the beginning of each shift, the federal appeals court based in Colorado has ruled. The decision affects nearly to 350 employees owed $31,585.

Previously, a lower court judge in Colorado sided with Nelnet Diversified Solutions, finding that the one to two minutes call-center employees spent each day navigating to the timekeeping system was so small as to not merit compensation. But on Friday, a three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit reversed that decision for failing to appreciate the financial impact for each worker.

“We are unprepared to dismiss indi- vidual claims of approximately $125 per year — particularly for ‘low wage workers’ who earn $13.50 an hour — as insignificant,” wrote Judge Nancy L. Moritz in the opinion.

Nelnet’s headquarters are in Lin- coln, Neb. In 2017, an ex-employee filed a lawsuit all*eagdidnitgiontahl violated the Fair Labor Standards Act by failing to properly account for and compensate call-center representatives’ hours worked.

According to the class-action lawsuit, Nelnet paid their call-center representatives once they clocked in to the timekeeping system at their workstations. However, before they could clock in, the workers needed to

boot up their computer, scan a security badge, enter credentials, and launch a software program called Citrix.

An expert for Nelnet estimated the average time it took call-center employees between badging in and opening Citrix, then the time required to clock in afterward. Altogether, it took workers an average of 1.6 minutes in the student-loan collector’s Omaha office, 2.2 minutes in the Lincoln office, and 2.27 minutes at the Aurora location. The class-action lawsuit covered those three sites for a window between 2014 and 2018.

The plaintiffs disputed the expert’s calculation. They submitted a statement from one former Aurora employee, Matthew Andrychuk, who said he encountered slow loading times on his computer and arrived early to work in anticipation of a 15-minute startup process.

“I was not paid for the time I spent booting up the computer and programs, which was about 1 hour and 15 minutes or longer each week, depending on computer and program loading technical issues,” he said.