Supreme Court Liberals rule with conservatives in favor of Amazon wage theft [View all]

[ND-Dem]

Opinion analysis: No overtime pay for after-work security check

Workers who are required to stay after their normal hours on the job to undergo a security screening are not entitled to overtime pay while they wait for that process and then go through it, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Tuesday.

The decision in Integrity Staffing Solutions, Inc. (Amazon's pet temp agency) v. Busk overturned the one federal appeals court that had ruled in favor of workers in that scenario — an increasingly common practice in the workplace.

The overtime pay case involved workers at two warehouses in Nevada, which served as storage and order-filling facilities for the online retail giant Amazon.com. Two of Integrity’s hourly workers sued the company after it began requiring all workers to go through screening before they left the premises, a policy designed to deter theft of goods.

The two workers, who filed a class-action lawsuit, contended that they had to wait up to twenty-five minutes to be searched, at which point they then had to remove their wallets, keys, and belts and pass through a metal detector. Their lawyers argued that because this procedure was a mandatory part of their job, imposed by their employer, they were entitled to be paid overtime for the additional time.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that Integrity had to pay overtime for the screening process, concluding that this after-work review was a job requirement and was for the company’s benefit.

Reversing that result, and reaching the same conclusion reached by all other federal appeals courts that had considered the issue, the Supreme Court declared that such screening procedures were not an “integral” part of the job. Integrity’s staff at the warehouses, the Court said in an opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas, were hired to take products off the shelves and package them for shipment to Amazon’s customers, not to go through security screenings.

The Court also found that Integrity could have eliminated the screenings without affecting the workers’ ability to complete their normal tasks. The decision commented that the Ninth Circuit was wrong in focusing on whether the employer had required the extra activity at the end of the workday. If that were the test, Justice Thomas wrote, it would sweep into the realm of paid employment the very kind of activities that Congress had enacted the Portal-to-Portal Act, passed in 1947 to narrow the scope of wage and hour rights under the Fair Labor Standards Act, to address.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Elena Kagan, wrote a brief concurring opinion, elaborating on their understanding of the standards the Thomas opinion had used.

http://www.scotusblog.com/2014/12/no-overtime-pay-for-after-work-security-check/


What a travesty. The company REQUIRES you to go through the screenings to keep your job. It's irrelevant that they "could" eliminate the screenings, or that the "normal" job consists of moving merchandise. The company requires its workers to be searched before they can leave the workplace, and the searches steal the workers' time for the benefit of the employer.