On December 9, 2014, the United States Supreme Court handed down its long awaited decision in Integrity Staffing Solutions, Inc. v. Busk. That case involved warehouse workers at various Amazon.com facilities. Those workers were required to pass through a security screening after their shift ended. They were not paid for the time that they had to stand in line. The amount of time that took is disputed. The Company said it wasn’t very much. The employees claimed that it was an extended period of time.
The employees lost at the trial court level, but the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed. They ruled that time spent in security screenings to guard against employee theft qualified as compensable time under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
The United States Supreme Court disagreed. In a unanimous opinion authored by Justice Thomas, the Court explained:
We hold that an activity is integral and indispensable to the principal activities that an employee is employed to perform – and thus compensable under the FLSA – if it is an intrinsic element of those activities and one with which the employee cannot dispense if he is to perform his principal activities. Because the employees’ time spent waiting to undergo and undergoing Integrity Staffing’s security screenings does not meet this criteria, we reverse the judgment of the Court of Appeals.
At first blush, this opinion seems a little unfair. Why should an employee not be paid for standing in a line that the employer forces them to stand in? It is important to remember that fairness is not the test. The issue is whether it is compensable under the Portal-to-Portal Act, which was an amendment to the FLSA. As a general rule, time spent traveling to and from work is not compensable. However, is important to understand the limits of this holding.
This case does not overrule the “continuous work day rule.” Under this rule, an employee is entitled to all of his time spent between the first principal activity and the last principal activity. Therefore, even under the Supreme Court’s decision, time spent in security screenings would be compensable if the employees had performed some work-related activity prior to going through them. Therefore, if they had had to attend meetings, fill out paperwork, or do some other clearly compensable work activity, they would be paid for going through the screenings.
Nevertheless, the unfairness of this decision is striking. It could produce draconian results. What if an employer forces employees to stand in a one-hour line? What if they force them to take a two- hour bus ride? These extreme categories clearly cry out for Congressional action, which is probably not forthcoming.
