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Comment by travisjungroth | Hacker News Reader

That makes no sense to me. If the company makes them undergo security screenings, they were hired to undergo security screenings. By this logic, it seems like they could make them do an hour of phone support at the beginning and end of each shift since that’s not what they were hired to do.

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I don’t have an opinion on this case, but this may be a useful analogy (and may not; I’m not a lawyer): employees are required to commute to work, but they are not compensated for their commute. There are plenty of jobs, in construction for example, where the job site changes on a regular basis. Some job sites require longer commutes than others. Compensation still doesn’t include commute time.

I don't think commutes are a good analogy here.

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.

I think you are on the right track. Further amazon is incentivized to save money on security staff even if it costs employees cumulatively hundreds of hours of work since employees wait time is free and individual employees are very replaceable.

And, perhaps most importantly, Amazon derives no benefit from the length of a worker's commute while Amazon derives all of the benefit of employee security (really, theft) screening.

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.

> employees are required to commute to work, but they are not compensated for their commute.

Where I live (another country), employers are required to compensate workers for their commute (vale-transporte).

Are workers compensated in proportion to the length of their commute? Is the company able to tell workers how to manage their commute?

> Are workers compensated in proportion to the length of their commute?

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.

Wow. That is the strangest thing that I've read ion a while.

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?

> Are employers allowed to take the location of prospective employees' residences into account when deciding to hire or not?

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).

Here's a better analogy: Imagine your employer requires you to work some night shifts, just to have someone on premises in case "something" happens. You and your employer both agree that often nothing happens, so you can in fact sleep during those night shifts. But your employer says that sleeping on the job is not work and therefore should not be paid.

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)

Exactly. Let’s change the laws.

I agree that this appears ripe for abuse -> the company could make this process as long and as painful as it wants, and pay no costs for this. Can they simply force employees to waste unlimited amounts of their time?

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