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.
The U.S. Supreme Court Building stands in Washington on Nov. 6, 2013.
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.
Supreme Court Sides Against Amazon Workers in Compensation Case - US News
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