Court to Workers: Time Is Not Money

Court rules that employees need not be compensated for post-shift security checks.

An Amazon warehouse in England. The Supreme Court sided against workers at an Amazon warehouse in Nevada who argued that they should be paid for time spent waiting to go through a metal detector.

A Supreme Court ruling that companies are not required to pay workers for time spent in post-shift security screenings is a setback in the effort to improve workplace standards, some labor activists say.

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In an unanimous decision released Tuesday, the court sided with contractor Integrity Staffing Solutions, which employed workers at Amazon.com warehouses in Nevada. Two employees had sued the agency for compensation for the 25 minutes they said they waited after each of their shifts to go through metal detector meant to root out theft.

'If the employer requires it, the work should be paid,' said Catherine Ruckelshaus, general counsel at the National Employment Law Project, in a statement. 'If we don't have to pay for things, we take them for granted. Because the employer didn't have to pay for the workers' time, it didn't care how long the screenings took, and had no incentive to add capacity to speed things up and be more considerate of the employees' time.'

According to the court, since the screenings were not integral to the the principal activity the workers were hired to perform, the company was not required to compensate them for the time spent waiting for them under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

'The screenings were not an intrinsic element of retrieving products from warehouse shelves or packaging them for shipment. And Integrity Staffing could have eliminated the screenings altogether without impairing the employees' ability to complete their work,' Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the decision, which cited Department of Labor policy and Congress' Portal-to-Portal Act.

Thomas also said the concerns expressed by workers in the case were better suited for the employer-employee bargaining table.

But workers, especially low-wage ones, have little bargaining power in the U.S. economy, evidenced by incomes that have stagnated or declined even as the labor market has improved. And Tuesday's decision 'runs contrary to everything people are saying about the need to counter wage stagnation and improve labor standards,' says Ross Eisenbrey, vice president of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.

'It was Thomas' argument that this is something employees could bargain over. That would be true if we had more than 6 percent of private sector employees in unions, but hardly anybody has a union contract anymore and the employers have so much power,' Eisenbrey says. 'Does Clarence Thomas really think that these employees are going to strike over 25 minutes of overtime pay?'

Twenty-five minutes of pay doesn't seem like much, Eisenbrey says, but over the course of several months could add up. What's more, the lines could take more time go get through depending on the situation.

'The employer can make this line as long as it wants. Instead of three checkout places, it could have one and it could have half as many people doing it, it could be more thorough checks and instead of 25 minutes, it could take two hours to check out,' Eisenbrey says.

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From an economic perspective, the Supreme Court's decision seems to condone an 'arbitrary increase in your work day without getting any additional compensation,' says Gary Burtless, a senior researcher of Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution.

'As an economist, we can rationalize the allocation of that 25 minutes to either unpaid time or paid time, as long as it's known in advance,' Burtless says. 'But if it's not known to workers when they've accepted the job assignment ... I just don't even understand how the reasoning works there.'

The decision overturned a ruling by a U.S. Appeals Court that favored the workers.

The Supreme Court's ruling will come as a relief to the business community, which, in the wake of the of the appeals court decision, saw a number of lawsuits challenging Amazon and other companies, including CVS and Apple, with similar compensation policies.

Business groups argued that compensating employees for security checks would be costly and impractical. Upholding the appeals court decision, the a coalition of businewss groups wrote in a brief filed in support of the temp agency, 'would result in decreased workplace safety, increased losses due to theft, and ultimately increased costs for the U.S. consumer.'