The U.S. Supreme Court ruled yesterday that employees who are required to wait in line to pass through a security check before leaving at the end of their shift are not entitled to compensation for that time. In a unanimous decision, the Court ruled that such time was not "integral and indispensable" to the employees' principal activities, and was, therefore, made non-compensable by the Portal-to-Portal Act.
The employees who brought this suit worked for a staffing agency at an Amazon.com warehouse. Their jobs entailed picking merchandise to fill orders and packaging those orders for shipment. At the end of each shift, they were required to wait upwards of twenty-five (25) minutes a day to go through a security check to make sure merchandise was not being stolen. They alleged that the security check time could have been reduced dramatically had the employer hired more security checkers to expedite the process or by staggering employee shift end times to avoid bottlenecks. They also maintained that they should be paid for the time spent waiting for and undergoing these security checks because they were conducted for the employer’s benefit to prevent employee theft.
The Court held that despite the fact that the security checks were an employer requirement which benefitted the employer, the time spent waiting for and going through them was not integral and indispensable to the employees' principal activity, which was to pull merchandise off of shelves and ship orders. The fact that the employer benefitted from the security checks, or could have substantially reduced the wait time by altering its check-out process or hiring more people, did not change the nature of the activity or its relationship to the principal activities the employees were employed to perform.
This is a significant victory for all employers who require employees to pass through security checks.
