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Comment by purple-again | Hacker News Reader

This goes so against what I previously believed that there must be some critical underlying fact I am missing. Are the facts below correct?

1) This is stating that Amazon requires its warehouse workers to go through a security screening before they can leave at the end of every shift.

2) This daily process takes 25 minutes to 1 hour

3) Employees are NOT paid for this time

4) Employees are hourly and not salary

5) The supreme court UNANIMOUSLY agreed they do not have to be paid for this work.

6) Their reasoning for this is that the security check is not a critical part of the job and could be eliminated.

Those 6 facts either cant be right or I must be missing some critical 7th fact that ties this all together. Can anyone help out?

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I haven't been able to figure it out either. My best guess is that the "integral and indispensable" was interpreted from the point of view of an employer, when it should have been interpreted from the point of view of the employee.

Amazon could eliminate the security check entirely with no adverse effects on the employee's work. From Amazon's point of view, it is easily dispensable. The employee's cannot opt out of the security check without being fired. From the employee's point of view, it is entirely indispensable.

Though not stated, I'd guess that there is also an unhealthy amount of efficient market hypothesis thrown in. If I assume that all markets are at equilibrium, then no company would have workers perform unnecessary work, because those workers would then choose to work somewhere that doesn't.

Edit: It may also be that the Court wanted to avoid extending existing law, and instead wanted to point out limitations in it for Congress to then amend. I'd have to read the transcripts in detail there, which I haven't done.

I think the 7th fact is that the Fair Labor Standards Act only requires employees be paid for labor that is "integral and indispensable" to their duties. In hindsight, it really should be something closer to "time spent at the behest of the employer".

> the security check is not a critical part of the job and could be eliminated.

lol, scores of work assignments and whole jobs shouldn't be compensated with this line of reasoning.

Stocking shelves isn't critical. Get rid of the shelves and park the pallets on the floor.

While not identical, the warehouse store model is essentially this, with different examples of execution more or less close to the exactly this.

lol, only if we follow the "sliperry slope" conclusion.

And if we take your comment to its sliperry slope conclusion, then employers could ask for employees to do anything, for any amount of time, unpaid, if they considered it "critical".

The critical seventh fact is that the law is a bad law and should be changed. Apparently it's so bad that even the liberal justices couldn't see their way to interpreting it in favor of the workers, in spite of their demonstrated pattern of favoring the worker in most cases.

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