MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:
The Supreme Court heard arguments today in a case that could affect millions of low-wage hourly workers across the country. At issue is whether federal law requires employers to pay workers for a significant amounts of time spent in security screenings. NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg has our report.
NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: Integrity Staffing Solutions is a temp agency that hires the workers for many of Amazon's warehouses. The employees fill customer orders and package them to ship. But after the workers clocked out, they had to go through an anti-theft screening, a process that they say, on average, took 25 minutes because the company set up just two screening checkpoints for a thousand workers at the shift change in Nevada. The workers sued, contending that under the federal law, they should be paid for the time spent in the long screening process. Mark Thierman represents the workers.
MARK THIERMAN: The reason they do it on the way out is because they don't want to pay for the time.
TOTENBERG: Lawyers for Integrity did not talk to reporters, but inside the Supreme Court today, the company lawyer, Paul Clement, told the justices that under the federal law, workers are not paid for clocking out or waiting to clock out, and therefore they should not be paid for the screening process afterwards. Justice Kagan interrupted - suppose you have an employer with an extensive process for closing out cash registers to protect against theft. If it weren't for the theft concern, you'd close out the register very quickly. The same would be true for bank tellers or casino employees. Instead of a couple of minutes, there would be a 20 minute anti-theft process. Why is that case different from going through the screening at Amazon? Clement seemed to suggest that in those cases too, the employees would not be paid for their time. Justice Scalia - could you say that closing down a register is part of the job, but getting yourself inspected as you leave is not? Justice Kagan - that would seem to make it depend on complete fortuity. After all, you could have the cashier take her trade to the manager station on her way out the door, so you'd have one answer at the cashier's station and another at the manager's station. Justice Ginsburg, is it irrelevant that because there are not enough screeners, what could be a five-minute process turns out to be, we are told, a 25-minute process? Lawyer Clement replied that it is irrelevant, though he maintained that some people at the front of the line would be screened in far less than 25 minutes. Justice Kennedy - isn't it for the benefit of the employer to hire fewer checkers, despite the fact that it causes long waits for the workers? Clement conceded the point, but maintained that still doesn't make the waiting time compensable. To qualify for compensation, he argued, the screening would have to be indispensable for the job. And he said that Amazon could perfectly well run a warehouse without security screening. Justice Kagan interrupted again - actually, Amazon, I don't think, can. What makes it Amazon is a system of inventory control so good that it knows where every toothbrush in the warehouse is. Arguing for the workers, Mark Thierman told the justices that either way, the fact is that once an employee clocks out, any other work-related task has to be paid for, unless there's a specific carve out in the law. Chief Justice Roberts - but nobody hires a worker to go through a security screening. It seems to me you're saying anything required for the benefit of the employer is an activity that has to be compensated. Answer, a person is hired to do with their told. That's their job, and it has to be paid for if it takes more than a trivial amount of time. Chief Justice Roberts - all of this is subject to collective bargaining, isn't it? Answer, no, these were nonunion workers, and most of these cases do not involve union workers. Thierman went on to argue that having just two checkers for a thousand people at one time was Integrity's choice. They could have, as they did later when they lost in court, hired more screeners and cut the wait time to five minutes. They could have had cameras on the warehouse floor. They could've searched at workstation, but they picked the cheapest way to do it without regard to the time it costs the workers. When he finished though, it was not at all clear that a majority of the court agreed the workers should be paid for the long daily wait. Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
