Don’t be surprised if your organization gets hit with a new kind of lawsuit sometime soon. The latest legal challenge:

Some employees think they should be paid for the time they spend booting up their computer and shutting it down.

This might not seem like much to a salaried worker, but to an hourly employee who watches the clock carefully, it could be a big deal.

In the past year, several companies, including AT&T Inc., UnitedHealth Group Inc. and Cigna Corp., got socked with lawsuits from employees who say they weren’t paid for the 15- to 30-minute task of booting their computers at the beginning of the day and logging out before they leave

Add those minutes up over a week, and hourly employees can lose some serious coin, argues plaintiffs’ lawyer Mark Thierman, a Las Vegas solo practitioner who’s filed a handful of computer-booting lawsuits in recent years.

“These are hourly employees who are not making much more than minimum wage,” Thierman told the National Law Journal. “There’s a good half-hour a day that they’re not being paid for. It adds up.”

For example, let’s figure a call center worker spends a half hour a day on booting a PC up and shutting it down. The worker’s time is clocked automatically based on when they log into the company’s network and when they log out. The worker puts in five days a week and makes $15 a hour. Over the course of a week, that’s 2.5 hours of time in the office call center that the worker’s not getting paid for.

That’s $37.50 a week of being at work that’s unpaid and $150 a month the worker misses out on.

It’s also $150 the company saves by not paying the worker for that time. Spread that out over a call center with 50 employees, and the company stands to save — or lose — $7500 a month. Chicken feed? Maybe, maybe not.

But the attorneys’ fees to hang onto that amount will need to be factored into the equation if you get hit with a suit.

The big question in these suits depends on which perspective you believe. The attorneys who are bringing suit argue that workers generally spend the time waiting for their computer to boot or shut down engaged in work activities — organizing materials, doing paperwork, consulting their calendar.

Company lawyers say most employees use the time for nonwork activities, like getting a cup of coffee or going for a cigarette break.

Regardless, the suits keep on coming. You may want to check out these cases:

• In California, hundreds of customer service representatives at call centers are suing Cigna Corp., claiming they were denied pay for the time spent booting up computers before and logging out after their shifts at the call centers. Hazel v. Connecticut General Life Insurance Co., No. C08-03552 (N.D. Calif.).
• In Georgia, AT&T and BellSouth Corp. have also been hit with computer-booting claims, filed by sales consultants and associates who claim, among other things, that they were denied pay for time spent booting up and shutting down computers before and after their shifts. Brooks v. AT&T, No. 1:07-cv-3054 (N.D. Ga.).
• In Missouri, UnitedHealth Group also is battling a proposed collective action that claims it failed to pay employees who work from home for time spent booting up their computers. Wolfert v. UnitedHealth Group Inc., No. 4:08-cv-01643 (D. Mo.).

What’s your take on whether this time should or shouldn’t be paid for by the employer?