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.
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...
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.
>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.
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?
Am I reading a Dr Seuss book or a Supreme Court decision?
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).
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.
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 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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."