Pre-Shift Shop Time and Travel Time Unpaid
Industrial Rescue and Confined-Space Safety Crews: Shop Time and Travel Time Left Off the Clock
First In Rescue Safety and Training, LLC | Rescue Supervisors and Safety Technicians | Pasadena, Texas
Industrial rescue crews do not simply show up at a refinery or chemical plant and start working. Before a crew can stand by for a confined-space entry, someone has to load the self-contained breathing apparatus, run bump tests on gas and benzene monitors, check radios, load water and ice, fuel and inspect the truck, hook up a trailer, and confirm which technicians are working which jobs. That work happens at the company shop, often hours before the client site opens. When a plant needs a crew in place for a 5:00 AM start in Freeport, the crew may be reporting to a Houston-area shop at 3:00 in the morning. The question for the workers doing it is whether the clock is running during any of that.
The Buenker Law Firm filed a federal collective action on July 16, 2026 against First In Rescue Safety and Training, LLC, a Pasadena, Texas company that provides confined-space rescue, industrial standby, and firefighting training services to industrial clients in Texas and nationally. The lawsuit alleges that the company recorded time in a system called PACE based on the client site’s scheduled start and stop times, so that hours were captured only from arrival at the client site to departure from it. Under that practice, according to the complaint, pre-shift shop preparation, post-shift equipment return and truck washdown, and after-hours calls and texts to line up the next day’s technicians were never recorded and never paid. The named plaintiff, a Rescue Supervisor who worked for the company from April 2023 until June 2026, alleges he at times worked 60 hours or more per week while being paid for fewer. He also alleges that travel time was either capped or not paid at all, and that supervisors were told they could not add shop time or travel time to their own PACE entries.
The Fair Labor Standards Act requires employers to pay non-exempt employees time and a half for every hour over 40 in a workweek, and it requires them to count all the hours that are actually worked. Loading life-safety equipment and testing gas monitors is not incidental to industrial rescue work; it is the setup without which the rescue service cannot be delivered. Once an employee starts that first principal activity of the day, the continuous workday has begun, and time through the last principal activity generally counts, including travel between worksites during the day. An employer does not get to move the start of the workday to a later point by choosing to run its timekeeping system off the client’s schedule instead of the employee’s. Separately, the FLSA makes it unlawful for an employer to take a materially adverse action against an employee because the employee complained about pay, whether the complaint went to the employer directly or to the Department of Labor. Cutting hours and removing job-related resources can qualify as adverse action.
The lawsuit was filed as a collective action on behalf of all current and former hourly, non-exempt field employees of First In Rescue Safety and Training, LLC who were required to perform pre-shift shop reporting and equipment preparation activities, post-shift equipment return and wrap-up activities, or both, that were not recorded as compensable time in the PACE system, during the three-year period prior to filing. The complaint alleges the PACE practice applied uniformly to field employees, including both supervisors and technicians, regardless of the client or job location. The case is currently pending in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas, Houston Division, Case No. 4:26-cv-05648.
The complaint alleges the exclusion of shop and travel time was a deliberate policy choice rather than an oversight, and that management responded to internal complaints not by correcting pay but by reducing the paper trail, including by directing employees to drive personal vehicles straight to client sites on certain jobs so that shop-reporting entries would not appear in the records. The complaint also alleges that new hires were required to attend a week of company-directed onboarding and training before being placed on payroll, and were not paid for that week. A Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division investigation into the company’s pay practices is pending. None of these allegations has been proven, and the company has not yet responded to the complaint.
Workers in similar situations may have legal rights under the FLSA. Because the complaint alleges that the employer acted intentionally and knowingly in violation of federal law, affected workers may be entitled to recover three years of back wages. Time limits apply.
