Legal Question in Employment Law in California

Commute time is never paid. It gets a little tricky when you work in the field and go straight to jobs from home. The technical rule is anything beyond the commute to your principal place of employment is on the company. Realistically, though, for field workers it rarely pays off enough to be worth it to track all the time you go five minutes farther than to the company office and the times you go six minutes closer. Add to that the fact that it will piss your employer off to have to track whether you are right and honest about that, and that you are an at will employee, and it only makes sense to make this an issue if you are being sent to REALLY far flung locations on a constant basis. As far as making you crawl through raw sewage, they can make you do that, but only if they are completely OSHA and Cal-OSHA compliant in your training, equipment and protective gear. If not, it is an OSHA and Cal-OSHA violation to require you to do that.