Workers for a water-filtration system sales company should have been compensated for their time for answering calls from home and being on-call to assist other workers, a federal judge said in a ruling in which he addresses a growing trend of employees being “misclassified” as independent contractors to avoid liability.

U.S. District Judge Jack Weinstein of the Eastern District of New York awarded more than $137,500 to two employees of Aqualife, which sells filtration systems to Russian-speaking communities in New York City and beyond. Both plaintiffs claimed independent contractor status on their tax returns.

Weinstein also approved an award of $139,800 to plaintiffs' attorneys Svetlana Sobel and David Feinerman, as well as Sobel's paralegal.

Weinstein affirmed a jury's finding, following a four-week trial, that Aqualife willfully failed to pay proper wages and overtime to two employees who took calls after hours from technicians and salespersons who needed assistance completing their sales.

On the evidence presented, Weinstein said, a jury could have concluded that the plaintiffs, Victoria Leevson and Katherine Tsigel, were considered employees of Aqualife under the Fair Labor Standards Act and the New York Labor Law because their employer controlled the place of work and the hours and tasks worked by the plaintiffs, as well as the fact that the plaintiffs self-classified as contractors in order to work for Aqualife.

The advent of new technology, Weinstein said, has “drastically expanded” the definitions of “work” and “on-call” time for today's employees; smartphones and email, the judge said, have created an increasingly “unpredictable and inescapable work environment that blurs the lines between work and free time.”

“Answering many phone calls night after night and completing sales from home qualifies as work that the defendants knew employees were engaging in, and that they should have been compensated for,” Weinstein said.

Aqualife was represented by Robert Bondar of the Law Office of Robert Bondar; and Jamie Felsen, Emanuel Kataev and Joseph Labuda of the Milman Labuda Law Group.