Bloomberg BusinessWeek gives the delightful headline “Amazon Warehouse Workers Want to Be Paid for Waiting in Line” to a story that begins:
Amazon.com warehouses are full of stuff people like. To cut down on theft, workers who box and ship it are required to pass through security checkpoints after their shifts, waiting in lines that can take almost 30 minutes to get through.
On Oct. 8 the Supreme Court will hear arguments about whether that time counts as work. In 2010 two former employees of Integrity Staffing Solutions, a temp agency that supplies workers at many of Amazon’s U.S. warehouses, sued the company demanding back pay for the time they spent in security lines after clocking out at Amazon warehouses in Nevada. The security checks, the plaintiffs argued, were required by Integrity and therefore part of the job. (Amazon-employed workers go through the same checks.)
This seems like a no-brainer to me: of course they should be paid for this. Precedent seems to be on their side:
At issue is the scope of a 1947 amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act that says employers don’t have to pay for time spent on work-related activities like getting to or from the office. Nine years later, the Supreme Court established in a pair of rulings that the key is whether the activity in question is “integral and indispensable” to the principal activities workers are paid to do. Butchers at a meatpacking plant, the court found, had to be paid for time spent sharpening their knives, and workers at a battery plant deserved compensation for time spent showering after work to wash off traces of sulfuric acid and lead.
I’ve been an exempt employee my entire working life, so never had to deal with this sort of thing. In my current job, which is on Marine Corps Base Quantico, I have to go through ID check at the gate every morning. Sometimes, that’s a 3-minute burden; sometimes, that’s a 25-minute burden. There’s no predicting which. Were I an hourly employee, I’d think that I’d be entitled to be paid for that time.
In the case of the Amazon employees, the case is even more clear. They’re being trapped at the office undergoing procedures specifically required by their employer. They should rather obviously clock out once they’re on the other side and free to leave.
