The United States Supreme Court holds that time spent undergoing post-shift security screenings was not compensable under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

A class of plaintiffs, who were tasked to retrieve items from warehouse shelves and package them for shipment to Amazon.com, customers filed this lawsuit, alleging that they were not paid for the time it took to undergo post-shift security screenings mandated by their employer.  The plaintiffs alleged that the average time it took to get through the security screenings was 25 minutes and that the failure to compensate them for this time violated the Fair Labor Standards Act, as the screenings were solely for the benefit of the employer.  The Supreme Court, however, rejected these claims and held that these screenings were not compensable under the Fair Labor Standards Act.  In particular, the Supreme Court determined that "an activity is integral and indispensable to the principal activities that an employee is employed to perform—and thus compensable under the FLSA—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."  As waiting to undergo security screenings and actually undergoing those screenings were not related to the employees' actual job responsibilities (i.e., retrieving items from shelves and packaging them for delivery), the tasks were not compensable.  This opinion demonstrates the importance for employers to methodically analyze their pay practices to determine whether there are certain tasks for which they are not compensating their employees and to confirm that such practices meet the requirements of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Case Law Alerts, 1st Quarter, January 2015