Supreme Court Rules Amazon Employees Don’t Need to Be Paid for Time Spent in Mandatory Security Screenings

eddygaleotti/iStock Editorial/Thinkstock(WASHINGTON) — The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that neither Amazon nor a temp agency that supplies workers for Amazon warehouses is required to pay employees at its warehouses for the time they spend going through a security screening at the end of the day.

The decision was presented by Justice Clarence Thomas with a concurring statement written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. The court said that while companies are required to pay employees for all integral and indispensable activities, the security screenings — which take approximately 25 minutes per day, according to court documents — do not apply.

Firstly, the court said, “the screenings were not the ‘principal activity or activities which [the] employee is employed to perform.” Secondly, the screenings could have been eliminated by the staffing company — Integrity Staffing — without impairing the employees’ ability to do their work.

An appeals court that ruled in favor of the employees erred, the Supreme Court said, in considering whether an employer requiring an activity makes it integral. Instead, because the employees’ time during screenings did not meet the legal criteria to be considered “integral and indispensable,” the companies are not required to pay the employees for that time.

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