Very often, approximately once or twice a week (it varies by week), I am required for my job to go to one of 5 cities in Southern California from the office in Diamond Bar. We are required to come to the office at 10:00 in the morning, then travel anywhere from 30 min to 2 hours and continue working until approximately 10 p.m. I know that the travel time from the office to the second location counts as time worked, but I am wondering about the time to come back from the other cities to go home--would that count as travel time that we could be reimbursed for? Would that fall under the "deduct your normal commute but the rest is overtime" rule? Or would this just be considered part of the usual course of duties?

Are you exempt or non-exempt?

non-exempt under CA law, mostly (90%) inside sales.

Although California is more strict on this question that federal law, I doubt that the DLSE would have a problem with the policy the employer is using. After all, it's the incremental time that is business-related, not the entire commute time home.

Sorry, don't have access to the DLSE manual here, so can't check to see if they've already addressed this there.

CA DLSE manual download. (http://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/Manual-Instructions.htm)