Cars. Lots of really fancy cars.

That about sums up my Sunday in which I went to the Concorso Ferrari & Friends car event in West Hartford Center.  It has one of the biggest collections of ultra-expensive cars in the state — all to benefit the Connecticut Children’s Medical Center.

What I wouldn’t do to commute in the Pagani supercar! (Anyone have an extra $3 million lying around?)

Now, the odds on you commuting in a supercar and wondering if you’re getting paid by your employer are probably about the same as winning Powerball, but it’s still worth asking the question: Why don’t you get paid for commuting to work?

The answer lies in the law and something called the Portal-to-Portal Act. 

The Act states that employers are not required to pay for the time employees spend on activities occurring before or after (“preliminary or postliminary”) they perform the principal activities for which they are employed.

Thus, compensable working time generally does not include time spent:

• Traveling to or from work.
• Engaged in incidental activities before or after work.

A few years ago, an argument was made that state law ought to allow for some compensable travel time to and from work if the employee was travelling with tools.

The Connecticut Supreme Court rejected that interpretation saying such laws were pre-empted by the Portal-to-Portal Act.

And yet, the Connecticut Department of Labor continues to advance a regulation on travel time that, according to same court, “was not promulgated pursuant to any formal rule-making procedures or articulated pursuant to any adjudicatory procedures, has not been time-tested or subject to judicial review in this state.”

In any event, commuting with a supercar might be fun — but it doesn’t change whether you get paid for it under the law.