U.S. Supreme Court rejects Amazon warehouse worker wage appeal
reuters.com
reuters.com
They should not be able to “clock out” until after such security checks.
[1] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/congressional...!
(Scroll down) https://news.gallup.com/poll/1600/congress-public.aspx
2. The article says "the screening takes around 25 minutes to complete", which is not typical in retail.
0.00hr. You should always be paid for your time unless that person agrees to volunteer it.
Amazon agrees with you... they contend that the screening doesn't actually take this long. I'm not clear on how a question of fact like this can be in dispute unless we are arguing over definitions.
> I've done the amazon fulfillment center tour and seen employees check in for different shifts, it does not take 25 minutes to go through the screening process.
No one is claiming that the check-in process takes a long time. The check-out process is the one where the employees are screened for theft, and that is where the employees claim they must wait (unpaid) for a long time.
> There's no way Amazon with its efficiency mantra would let this happen knowing how it eventually impacts the bottom line.
I find that completely unpersuasive. The courts have just told Amazon that they DON'T HAVE TO PAY for this time. So it isn't inefficient for them to allow it to take lots of time. It doesn't affect Amazon's bottom line until the point where it becomes difficult for Amazon to hire any workers.
The headline is a little misleading. The appellate court was letting the case vs. Amazon go to trial under state labor law; the Supreme Court decided not to intervene, so the dispute is still being litigated.
(Previously, the Supreme Court said time being screening doesn't require compensation under Federal law).
How do workers trying to leave the warehouse affect their bottom line? They are no longer on the clock so it is no longer Amazon's problem. It is a big problem for workers who have to waste 5-15% of their free time on this obligatory work task.
I'd be skeptical of how representative a tour is.
> seen employees check in for different shifts, it does not take 25 minutes to go through the screening process
Check-in isn't the situation in dispute.
Looks like they had similar issues?
https://www.plbsh.com/jury-awards-walmart-employees-6-millio...
It was just horse shit to get free labour out of people, but that seems to be the industry.
[0]: https://content.next.westlaw.com/6-508-0673?transitionType=D...
This is more akin to being locked on the company premises after work has terminated unpaid but unable to leave. If they can't do a bag check in 5 minutes and leave amazon should hire more checkers to do that work or compensate the employees for the time lost.
Perhaps the proper thing to assert is imprisonment instead of wage theft.
Regardless of the philosophy, what do you think of the legal basis?
And no, it’s not acceptable to expect them to simply resign. Changing jobs can also incur significant costs on people, which can allow employers to exploit their position of power over employees.
When an employment contract talks about working hours, it should not be necessary to refer to small print or seemingly unrelated clauses to know what that means. It should have a straightforward and unsurprising meaning. Employers should not be able to make up surprising and counterintuitive definitions of things like working hours, and manipulate those in their favour. In general employees should not be required to understand special exceptions from standard expected practice, unless there are specific well understood and communicated reasons that require it.
On the face of it, I don't think this case meets that sort of standard. In general I am in favour of a high degree of flexibility in the form of employment contracts. My own working hours and the expectations of my job are somewhat unusual. I work highly variable hours and I am frequently on call. I do get paid for the hours I work though.
However I do think this is a reasonable area for legislation because I think that's the only way to ensure employees are not abused, and in this case I think it's pretty clear Amazon did not signal this clearly to prospective employees and is abusing it's position of power over them in an unreasonable way.
If I'm not mistaken, airline flight attendants don't get paid until the door shuts, bet none of you that fly regularly are outraged about that.
And as someone that worked in a facility where I had to park off site, ride a bus unpaid, clear security unpaid, ride another bus unpaid then I could clock in (on time, 1 second over was late which was penalized) then had to repeat it in reverse... I was more than happy to have the job and quite fine not getting paid doing that.
Every prison guard, anyone working at UPS/USPS/FedEx sort facility, etc (not to mention people in state and federal court houses, the white house, the CIA, the FBI etc) go through this same thing every day.
One is semi-optional, the other is mandatory.
If someone can make money by fraud, that money is not justification to allow fraud. The US economy relies on dependable contacts.
Which law? "The Law" as an ideal, is impartial. That's irrelevant. In practice, applied law (and the cousin enforced law) leads to biased results, favoring the wealthy and the status quo while remaining "impartial".
We shouldn't let a defeatist attitude discourage attempts at improvement.
I'm very libertarian- but at the end of the day I will always support the government authority to punish theft. And a failure to pay employees the agreed upon rate is theft.
This isnt about being caught- the evidence is clear as day and was presented in court.
This is about a failure of our legal system to protect basic rights of a laborer to be paid the agreed upon rate.
Why are people so quick to defend the powerful?
John Steinbeck wasn't wrong.
As such, we have leaders and followers.
By definition of leaders and followers, most people will be followers, whether for genetic or environmental reasons.
Followers will always support those who are leaders. In our current society, that would mean the powerful.
If you don't believe me, look at behavioral sciences. Most people will shock someone to death just because an authority said so (yes the Millgram experiments were biased, but the results aren't completely invalidated by that)
Packing an individual box takes minutes. So it's a question of capacity, and it's pretty binary. If they have enough capacity then a large majority of items can ship within a couple hours. If they don't have enough capacity then the 90th percentile shipping time becomes indefinite/never. A situation where packaging takes an extra day, end of story, is unlikely and unstable.
And I'd say that some robots are R&D, so not having money for them has no effect on shipping times, and the rest are a cost-saving measure, so they'll always have the money.
It's not like Amazon is running a zero sum balance sheet here. They have profits this could take out of and maintain all their service and speed.
I'm with you though, it costs the consumer nothing.
Framing it that way, of course people would respond negatively to price increases.
"Amazon workers now paid for all the time they're clocked in, prices may be affected" is a lot more sympathetic to workers.
Please refer to this documentary about Walmart. They're not just anti-labor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wal-Mart:_The_High_Cost_of_Low...
While Walmart didn't invent bad behavior, they're pretty good at it.
If I wanted to take law into my own hands I might as well go to the local gangsters and smugglers.
So it seems like if the security isn't integral to the job, then someone should be able to just walk out without doing the screening. Then of course they would get fired for that, and could then sue that they got fired despite the fact that the screening isn't integral to their job duties. The company would either have to claim that the security is integral, or allow others to skip it too.
Now of course, a warehouse worker doesn't have the resources to engage in such a lawsuit or live without a job while it plays out, which is what Amazon counts on here. But what if someone agreed to pay all the legal fees and pay the employee an equivalent wage to be a test case?
[0] https://www.scotusblog.com/2014/12/no-overtime-pay-for-after...
First, the Court found that performing screenings is not what employees are hired to do: they're not the point of the job, just a condition of employment. This is fairly obvious, but necessary to establish because someone who was paid to do screenings (e.g. as a physical security pen-tester) would obviously need to be paid for that.
Second, it found that those screenings are not "integral" to the job. This sounds odd for a required screening, but the context is specifically about the work of the job and not the terms of employment. Pre/post work like donning safety gear or a toolbelt is (legally or practically) necessary to complete the work, so past cases have found that it's effectively part of the labor and must be paid. This is also the context of the final holding: if Integrity could eliminate the screenings without affecting the workers' ability to pick and package goods, they must not be an intrinsic aspect of the job.
The Portal to Portal Act says that any labor which benefits the employer must be paid, while generally asserting that other pre/post work does not need to be paid, with commuting as a specific example of necessary-but-unpaid time. So "you'll get fired if you don't do it" isn't actually enough to qualify.
Perversely, the result of the act is that employers can't require unpaid, necessary tasks, but can require unpaid, unnecessary tasks. On one level, this makes sense: if putting on a toolbelt, wetsuit, or whatever else is necessary for the work, every employer will require it and failing to pay for that time is clearly harmful. But if an employer makes you recite a corporate chant before starting work, you can quit and go somewhere else. On another level, the contract system seriously distorts the logic: you can only be employed at that Amazon warehouse by fulfilling this restriction.
Ultimately, though, the court doesn't care about that. Congress passed a law which effectively says useless work time doesn't need to be paid, so this practice is legal. Which I believe holds all the way through the absurd case: if these screenings took 80 hours a week, they'd still be legal to not pay.
Tangentially it seems crazy they're not required to pay for the time spent going through security. If they're paid hourly and not free to go they're still on the job.
The Supreme Court (and appellate courts) are a batch system, with high throughout but poor latency. The Supreme Court reviews 7,000-8,000 petitions for certiorari each year, rendering judgment in the merits after oral argument on about 80-100 cases per year. Each case typically has hundreds of pages of briefing, rulings below, etc., and requires reference to hundreds of additional pages of precedent and other authorities. All that is done by the nine justices, each with the assistance of four clerks.
Personally I think the system works great but I’ve never been a “too down” style person anyway.
That's what this line refers to: petitions for cert are requests to have the Court hear a case. They only accept ~10%.
It’s an asshole move for sure. I hope they are forced to pay up, and then they will invest in streamlining the process.
Yes, but corporations aren't known for going out of their way not to be assholes (more accurately--not known to go above and beyond the most basic compliance with local and federal labor and employment laws).
Tech workers benefit from the high demand for tech skills, so we typically have low "asshole" behavior from companies, less we just find another job.
Other workers typically do not. Certainly non-techworkers who work for tech companies get better treatment simply based on a uniform set of policies and procedures, but often, they are employees of a contract firm, and not subject to the same treatment as the tech employees.
I'm not sure how I feel about low-skill/low-wage workers being subject to unpaid security checks.
Being paid for time they are required to fulfill duties vs "A few rotten apples spoil the bunch."
It's a supreme court decision that is allowing Amazon to do this [0].
TL;DR the decision is solely on if the "activities are an intrinsic element of the employee’s primary job duties and one that cannot be skipped" and since they were "hired to retrieve products from warehouse shelves, not to undergo security screenings, and the company could eliminate the screenings altogether without impairing the employees’ ability to complete their work" Amazon/warehouse contractor didn't have to pay for it.
[0] https://www.idfa.org/news-views/headline-news/article/2014/1...
The existence and length of a worker's commute isn't Amazon's fault, nor is it under their control.
The existence and length of the security screenings is.
A better analogy might be employees changing into a required uniform, which (I believe) is also exempted, though obviously does not typically take ~25 minutes every day.
Where I live (another country), employers are required to compensate workers for their commute (vale-transporte).
Are employers allowed to take the location of prospective employees' residences into account when deciding to hire or not?
If I lived across the country, would the employer have to pay for daily plane tickets?
I believe they are.
> If I lived across the country, would the employer have to pay for daily plane tickets?
I don't know anywhere in this country where an airplane is considered public transport, so no (vale-transporte is only for public transport AFAIK).
The workers are compensated for the tickets to the public transport they use. If they need to use more than one (for instance, taking a bus and then the ferry, or a bus and then the train and then another bus), they will be compensated for all these tickets.
> Is the company able to tell workers how to manage their commute?
AFAIK, when there's more than one public transport route, it's the worker who chooses which route they will use.
The European Court of Justice held that the employer is wrong, and if they require you to be on premises, even if sleeping, that's work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landeshauptstadt_Kiel_v_Jaeger (this was related to European laws, of course, not American ones)
But seriously, could that test be any more absurd? The test should not be "of Amazon could eliminate screenings with out affecting the primary job." It should be if the employee could choose not to participate without it affecting their job.
It's the difference between voluntary and compelled.
Couldn't the Supreme Court declare the test unconstitutional?
It was a unanimous decision here, because the Portal-to-Portal Act (the 1947 law referenced) has pretty consistently been interpreted both by regulatory bodies and courts in the intervening 70+ years to explicitly exclude such activities from the FLSA. If you want to change this, you definitely need to go to Congress with this.
Want change? Get Congress to change the law, because the law, as written now, permits this.
Wow. They were hired to do work, not to be locked up for half an hour per day and treated like criminals. Moreover, it is obviously clear that Amazon could just stop locking them up for half an hour per day and treating them like criminals. Therefore Amazon owes them no compensation for locking them up for half an hour per day and treating them like criminals. That is one hell of a Supreme Court ruling.
Am I reading a Dr Seuss book or a Supreme Court decision?
>The FLSA establishes minimum wage and overtime compensation for the time that employees work over 40 hours in one work week. Congress constructed the Act so that employers are not required to compensate employees for activities that occur before and after shifts unless those activities are integral and indispensable to the work an employee is employed to perform.
The employer will fire you for not doing it. That makes it essential.
Any interpretation of such a law that uses the job description, eg packing and moving boxes, as the be-all-end-all of what is "integral and essential" instead of what the employer will fire or refuse to employ you for not doing is either bought and paid for or anti-labor.
This issue boils down to whether people have to work 8 vs. 9 hours for a certain amount of pay, with some paperwork issues piled on top. It matters but there aren't any human rights involved in any meaningful way. The law isn't inherently invalid.
If you mean "hold you against your will", they can't do that.
If you mean "you have to do it to stay employed", they can.
The question here is how pay is calculated. It's not whether the security checks themselves are a problem.
Yes. Specifically, whether your employer can make you do work that they don't define as work and therefore don't pay, even though it has all the characteristics of work: Being where they tell you when they tell you doing what they tell you.
That's why this is being fought with state law, not the constitution. The federal law is doing something stupid, but the stupidity is mostly an accounting trick. Everyone is still getting paid for their total labor.
I see we won't agree here, so I'm out.
No, it's federal law which allows Amazon to do this.
The Supreme Court's role is not to act as a kind of super-legislature, creating and changing laws at whim: its role is to adjudicate disputes as to what the actual letter of the law requires given the facts of specific cases.
> The Congress finds that the Fair Labor Standards Act ... has been interpreted judicially in disregard of long-established customs, practices, and contracts between employers and employees, thereby creating wholly unexpected liabilities, immense in amount and retroactive in operation, upon employers with the results that, if said Act as so interpreted or claims arising under such interpretations were permitted to stand, (1) the payment of such liabilities would bring about financial ruin of many employers ...
And that's only the first of ten+ chicken-little scenarios laid out in the Congressional Findings section.
I also imagine that a lot of the people calling for the Supreme Court to make this and other decisions on the basis of whatever feels fair to the individual justices would be a lot less happy if that methodology were applied to various other things.
This isn't a company that's on a sink or swim margin where this will collapse the company. Not when they're fine stocking all the break rooms in corporate offices with starbucks and AWS people get shelves full snacks all day. But give an hourly employee a little more money to accommodate their self enforced security is a line too far.
If you're an Amazon corporate employee, you support these decisions by working there.
It's pretty much a factory for software developers.
A live-able salary is the only perk of being an Amazon corporate employee.
Yes, that is how employment works, and the compensation is better than livable for those who would make that elsewhere.
After you are a toddler, and once you are rich, do you need permission to buy snacks?
If work has shitty coffee I can of course bring my own but the kind of people that buy shitty coffee are often stingy in other ways that are more meaningful like raises. It might well be a good indication to look elsewhere.
Or is it even a problem? Maybe Amazon deliberately puts on their best Ebenezer Scrooge to weed out people with too much taste and not enough nose-to-grindstone.
You guys clearly think more about what messages the workplace is sending you than maybe Amazon wants their employees to. ;- )
It's better than supporting mass surveillance by working at Google or Facebook I'd think, if you compare to the alternative FAANG companies.
https://blog.aboutamazon.com/working-at-amazon/how-a-door-be...
Amazon has a surplus of money.. enough to buy other large corporations, like Whole Foods. And Jeff Bezos has so much money, he literally doesn’t know what to do with it.
Amazon will pay billions in legal costs before ever considering costs that actually benefit the workers.
He didn't. He has principles, and the principle is that you work for money and then use it to buy things that you care about.
It's worth noting that anyone who cares about this should refrain from purchasing things from the Amazons and the Walmarts of the world. The only thing these trans-human entities care about is money - that's IT. The only language they speak is money, and they will destroy the world, their human employees, and anything else that comes between them and their goal of capturing 100% of all economic power. The only thing to do is to stop feeding the beast. Don't buy shit from mega corps - no matter how convenient it is. It's unnecessary and directly helps propagate a system where sociopathic political-economic agents repress living standards for the vast majority of people so that a shockingly small number can be wealthier than kings.
Amazon starts at more than double federal minimum wage... it took me a decade to make 15 dollars an hour at my job...
Based on the tone of your response, I take it that you are not supportive of my criticism of Amazon et al. A question for you: do you wish for other people (including yourself in the future, your possible children, or your friends and family) to have to struggle to make an amount of money that can support their basic needs? The fact of the matter is that the current federal minimum wage is completely insufficient to meet the needs of a person attempting to make it in the modern world - even 2X the federal minimum is incredibly low given the uncertainties around health care and higher education / job training.
When a series of corporations are vacuuming up an overwhelming majority of all productivity gains and the top 0.01% are becoming wealthier than historical princes, it is very valid and important to level a critical eye at the fairness of the situation so that we can all improve together and not have our societal progress retarded by sociopathy and greed.
I recommend reading the ruling [0] itself; it's readable and quite short, under 2,500 words.
The unanimous 2014 decision concluded that Amazon (technically, a contractor) could not be penalized under federal law for not paying workers for time spent getting through security screenings. It turned on the 1947 Portal-to-Portal Act. IANAL, but, looking at the decision, I don't see how they could have reasonably ruled any other way.
To summarize:
In the 1940s, courts had interpreted the Fair Labor Standards Act (source of the minimum wage, overtime pay, etc.) to imply very broad definitions of "work" and "workweek". This allowed mine workers to sue for back pay for all the time they spent traveling between mine portals and work areas. This wasn't consistent with pre-FLSA practice, and companies suddenly faced huge, unexpected lawsuits for back pay and damages. Congress passed the Portal-to-Portal Act explicitly to clarify the definition of time "on the clock" and prevent these lawsuits, excluding "preliminary" and "postliminary" activities.
It is this law that results in Amazon not having to pay their workers for the screenings. Quoting from Sotomayor's concurrence:
The security screenings at issue here fall on the
“preliminary . . . or postliminary” side of this line.
(*citation*) The searches were part of the process by
which the employees egressed their place of work, akin
to checking in and out and waiting in line to do so
activities that Congress clearly deemed to be
preliminary or postlimininary. See (*citation*).
Indeed, as the Court observes, the Department of Labor
reached the very same conclusion regarding similar
security screenings shortly after the Portal-to-Portal
Act was adopted
So, if the appeals court overturned the dismissal, wouldn't the appeal the Supreme Court denied be to uphold it, meaning that the case should be moving forward? Such a badly worded article.
Fortunately Nevada is taking a stand against slavery that the US Supreme Court refused to do in 2014.
Amazon Rejected by U.S. Supreme Court on Pay Claims by Workers
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-07/amazon-re...
However, from what I recall of Amazon's announcement this year, they pay all warehouse workers at least $15/hr. This means they are significantly above the minimum wage requirement, even if you factor in the 30 minutes spent in security screenings.
In an ideal world, Amazon would factor in the time spent in security screenings, when advertising the job's hourly rate. Ie, workers are spending 5% of their time in security screenings, so the advertised hourly rate should be 5% lower than $15/hr. I would also like for all food-prices in restaurants to factor in taxes for the same reason, but I've thrown the towel on that fight. Ultimately, this seems like a purely cosmetic change with little substance behind it.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear Amazon.com’s bid to avoid a lawsuit seeking to ensure that warehouse workers ... get paid for the time it takes them to go through extensive post-shift security screenings.
What really needs to happen is a federal or state law modification - time under control of employer required to maintain job is time worked. Why this is for courts to legislate is silly.
https://www.plbsh.com/jury-awards-walmart-employees-6-millio...
I suppose that's not exactly the same since it only covers security time eating into break time not, after work time.
What if there aren’t any other companies they can work for, because Amazon has undercut all their competitors by, among other things, systematically engaging in wage theft.
If wage theft is helping to keep the prices down, and other businesses went bust because they were unable to compete with a large business that was ignoring the law, then that isn’t a free market economy, and the victims are now in a position where they have even less power to prevent abuse and wage theft.
The fact that the US courts seem to have decided that mandatory unpaid presence is somehow not something that violates existing Labour law is absurd.
If my booked hours are from X-Y and it takes 25 minutes for your company to get me to the door, then I should have stopped “working” at Y-25 minutes.
If you don’t want to pay me to sit around for 25 minutes you can fix your processes so that it doesn’t take 25 minutes.
Or alternatively: you aren’t permitting me to leave, your not paying me, and you don’t believe I’ve actually stolen anything (eg you’re waiting for police to come and arrest me), then that’s false imprisonment and the entire management chain involved in it should be sent to jail.
I kid of course, the management chain are the people with money contributing to politicians that are saying illegal imprisonment is awesome.
Also we could also talk about: dry clean suits, taking showers, cutting hair, shaving, putting on make-up, etc.
Moreover, why not just make the workers salaried so they can’t complain?