Supreme Court Rules Amazon Workers Not Owed Compensation for Security Screenings

The Supreme Court reversed a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision and unanimously ruled that warehouse workers filling orders for Amazon don’t have to be paid for time spent going through security checks. Integrity Staffing v. Busk stemmed from a lawsuit brought by workers employed by Integrity Staffing Solutions, who claimed they were entitled to compensation under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) for the time spent waiting to undergo and to go through security screenings. But “an activity is integral and indispensable to the principal activities that an employee is employed to perform ... if it is an intrinsic element of those activities and one with which the employee cannot dispense if he is to perform his principal activities,” Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said Tuesday in the court opinion. Because the employees’ time spent waiting to undergo, as well as undergoing, Integrity Staffing’s security screenings doesn’t meet these criteria, the appeals decision was reversed, he said. That time isn’t compensable under the FLSA, he said. The 9th Circuit asserted that post-shift activities that ordinarily would be classified as “non-compensable postliminary activities are nevertheless compensable as integral and indispensable to an employee’s principal activities if those postshift activities are necessary to the principal work performed and done for the benefit of the employer.” That court erred by focusing on whether an employer required a particular activity, Thomas said. That an employer could conceivably reduce the time spent by employees on any preliminary or postliminary activity doesn’t change the nature of the activity “or its relationship to the principal activities that an employee is employed to perform,” he said. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan submitted a joint concurring statement. The allegations in this case "were simply not true," an Amazon spokeswoman said. Data show that employees typically walk through security with little or no wait, "and Amazon has a global process that is designed to ensure the time employees spend waiting in security is less than 90 seconds," she said.