"A judge there dismissed the case, citing the 2014 Supreme Court ruling, since Nevada wage laws track their federal counterparts. The Cincinnati, Ohio-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2018 overturned that decision."
So, if the appeals court overturned the dismissal, wouldn't the appeal the Supreme Court denied be to uphold it, meaning that the case should be moving forward? Such a badly worded article.
So, trying to follow the sequence of thrown out and overturned, it seems like now it would be going all the way back down to the original court that threw out the lawsuit to go forward? Seems crazy that it's taking this long to settle the question.
Tangentially it seems crazy they're not required to pay for the time spent going through security. If they're paid hourly and not free to go they're still on the job.
> Tangentially it seems crazy they're not required to pay for the time spent going through security. If they're paid hourly and not free to go they're still on the job.
It’s an asshole move for sure. I hope they are forced to pay up, and then they will invest in streamlining the process.
> In its 2014 ruling in the case, the Supreme Court decided that under a 1947 law that amended the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, companies do not have to pay employees for the time they spend undergoing security checks.
It's a supreme court decision that is allowing Amazon to do this [0].
TL;DR the decision is solely on if the "activities are an intrinsic element of the employee’s primary job duties and one that cannot be skipped" and since they were "hired to retrieve products from warehouse shelves, not to undergo security screenings, and the company could eliminate the screenings altogether without impairing the employees’ ability to complete their work" Amazon/warehouse contractor didn't have to pay for it.
It was the Supreme Court's job to change the laws about abortion and gay marriage and school segregation when Congress obviously messed up or failed to act.
Those are issues about treating people humanely and as equals.
This issue boils down to whether people have to work 8 vs. 9 hours for a certain amount of pay, with some paperwork issues piled on top. It matters but there aren't any human rights involved in any meaningful way. The law isn't inherently invalid.
I bet traffic problems would be solved overnight if employers were required to compensate employees for commute times. It's time to stop giving freebies on people's backs, tbh.
The entire law doesn't need to be invalid. But if it says that your employer can force you to be present without compensation, that part can be inherently invalid.
Yes. Specifically, whether your employer can make you do work that they don't define as work and therefore don't pay, even though it has all the characteristics of work: Being where they tell you when they tell you doing what they tell you.
They pay you every two weeks. From a human rights point of view, it doesn't matter the tiniest bit whether a workday is 8 hours at $12 plus .75 hours at $0, or 8.75 hours at $11. So there is no reason for the supreme court to intervene on that basis. The lawmakers are in charge here, and the law won't be inherently invalid.
That's why this is being fought with state law, not the constitution. The federal law is doing something stupid, but the stupidity is mostly an accounting trick. Everyone is still getting paid for their total labor.
From a human rights point of view it absolutely matters if you agree to work 8 hours per day, and your employer agrees to pay you for 8 hours of work per day, but also decides to keep you locked up for some extra unpaid time.
You're not locked up. You agree to the extra unpaid time as a bundle with the paid time. You can quit any time. And your pay each week is a fair amount.
>The FLSA establishes minimum wage and overtime compensation for the time that employees work over 40 hours in one work week. Congress constructed the Act so that employers are not required to compensate employees for activities that occur before and after shifts unless those activities are integral and indispensable to the work an employee is employed to perform.
The employer will fire you for not doing it. That makes it essential.
Any interpretation of such a law that uses the job description, eg packing and moving boxes, as the be-all-end-all of what is "integral and essential" instead of what the employer will fire or refuse to employ you for not doing is either bought and paid for or anti-labor.
Not that it is the supreme court's fault, assuming that test is very explicit in the act.
But seriously, could that test be any more absurd? The test should not be "of Amazon could eliminate screenings with out affecting the primary job." It should be if the employee could choose not to participate without it affecting their job.
It's the difference between voluntary and compelled.
Being locked up at work without compensation. I guess the Constitution's "involuntary servitude" wording was meant for other contexts (actual 24/7 slavery), but this still seems like a basic human rights violation. But maybe the US Supreme Court doesn't view itself as a human rights court, so I don't know. That's why I asked.
That simply isn't how the Supreme (or any) court works. Perhaps there is a servitude issue at hand, but that is not the argument that the plaintiff made.
hired to retrieve products from warehouse shelves, not to undergo security screenings, and the company could eliminate the screenings altogether without impairing the employees’ ability to complete their work
Am I reading a Dr Seuss book or a Supreme Court decision?
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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)
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?
> hired to retrieve products from warehouse shelves, not to undergo security screenings, and the company could eliminate the screenings altogether without impairing the employees’ ability to complete their work
Wow. They were hired to do work, not to be locked up for half an hour per day and treated like criminals. Moreover, it is obviously clear that Amazon could just stop locking them up for half an hour per day and treating them like criminals. Therefore Amazon owes them no compensation for locking them up for half an hour per day and treating them like criminals. That is one hell of a Supreme Court ruling.
It’s seems degrading to be subject to this but at the same time the majority of theft is from employees. I’ve hear about these type of precautions at UPS sorting centers. It’s also why cash register security cameras are pointed at the register not where a robber would be in clear view.
That said I’m almost certain the UPS employees are paid while doing the screening. That’s a benefit of labor unions.
Indeed. I've worked in electronics and home entertainment retail in the past and been subject to similar checks. The majority of theft is indeed carried out by employees.
It was a unanimous decision here, because the Portal-to-Portal Act (the 1947 law referenced) has pretty consistently been interpreted both by regulatory bodies and courts in the intervening 70+ years to explicitly exclude such activities from the FLSA. If you want to change this, you definitely need to go to Congress with this.
Looks like there were several precedents and regulatory opinions here covering this exact issue, and the 9th Circuit disagreed with them. SC reversed the 9th circuit to maintain consistency.
Want change? Get Congress to change the law, because the law, as written now, permits this.
I understand this is an unpopular SCOTUS ruling/decision but I don't understand why a comment summarizing and linking to the case is worthy of downvotes? Is something about this comment inaccurate or misleading in some way that I'm missing?
I also imagine that a lot of the people calling for the Supreme Court to make this and other decisions on the basis of whatever feels fair to the individual justices would be a lot less happy if that methodology were applied to various other things.
> It's a supreme court decision that is allowing Amazon to do this.
No, it's federal law which allows Amazon to do this.
The Supreme Court's role is not to act as a kind of super-legislature, creating and changing laws at whim: its role is to adjudicate disputes as to what the actual letter of the law requires given the facts of specific cases.
And it looks like Congress was particularly snippy towards their colleagues in the Judicial branch when they passed the law[1] in question:
> The Congress finds that the Fair Labor Standards Act ... has been interpreted judicially in disregard of long-established customs, practices, and contracts between employers and employees, thereby creating wholly unexpected liabilities, immense in amount and retroactive in operation, upon employers with the results that, if said Act as so interpreted or claims arising under such interpretations were permitted to stand, (1) the payment of such liabilities would bring about financial ruin of many employers ...
And that's only the first of ten+ chicken-little scenarios laid out in the Congressional Findings section.
Yes, but corporations aren't known for going out of their way not to be assholes (more accurately--not known to go above and beyond the most basic compliance with local and federal labor and employment laws).
Tech workers benefit from the high demand for tech skills, so we typically have low "asshole" behavior from companies, less we just find another job.
Other workers typically do not. Certainly non-techworkers who work for tech companies get better treatment simply based on a uniform set of policies and procedures, but often, they are employees of a contract firm, and not subject to the same treatment as the tech employees.
I'm not sure how I feel about low-skill/low-wage workers being subject to unpaid security checks.
Being paid for time they are required to fulfill duties vs "A few rotten apples spoil the bunch."
The current court is often rejecting cases that they feel are more the responsibility of the legislature to resolve. I had heard an opinion on this that the court thought it was the problem of Congress to fix this NOT the court.
I'd feel much better about that if there was a way for the court to guarantee the question would be addressed by the legislature where as right now they usually just continue to exist in the grey area status quo.
Yes. The Supreme Court rejected a claim in 2014 under federal law. Plaintiffs replead claims under state law. While a district court found the claims barred by state law as well, the Sixth Circuit found the claim were not. The Supreme Court declined to review the Sixth Circuit‘s ruling, meaning the case can go forward under the Sixth Circuit’s decision.
The Supreme Court (and appellate courts) are a batch system, with high throughout but poor latency. The Supreme Court reviews 7,000-8,000 petitions for certiorari each year, rendering judgment in the merits after oral argument on about 80-100 cases per year. Each case typically has hundreds of pages of briefing, rulings below, etc., and requires reference to hundreds of additional pages of precedent and other authorities. All that is done by the nine justices, each with the assistance of four clerks.
If I understand your comment (which is much clearer than the article) the 2014 US Supreme Court decision with respect to the 1947 Act is still valid Federal. The 6th Circuit ruled that the US Supreme Court decision and the 1947 Act do not preclude lawsuits on the state level. That makes more sense, because it seemed odd that if the 6th Circuit disagreed with a 2014 Supreme Court ruling, they would hear it.
Amazon's argument wasn't that the FLSA prohibited state suits; it was about interpretation of Nevada state law. Specifically, Nevada had defined "work" to be "whatever the definition of work is under the federal FLSA". The appeals court ruled that, since the FLSA said the security checks exception was specifically an exception, it was still legally defined as work, and Nevada had not adopted the federal exceptions.
It seems eminently reasonable and obvious that workers should be compensated for performing the Duties of their job while at work or in premises. Clearly submitting to a security check before being allowed to leave work is an obligation they incur as an employee.
They should not be able to “clock out” until after such security checks.
I get what you're saying, but these are the ways that management finds the margins that allow you to receive cheap products on your doorstep in 2 days.
I have no incentive to care about the grocery store I frequent, but it is still illegal for me to steal from them and I can expect to be held accountable by the government in the event that I do steal from them.
I'm very libertarian- but at the end of the day I will always support the government authority to punish theft. And a failure to pay employees the agreed upon rate is theft.
I don't see how it's that similar. Employees getting a new job is often very difficult, so would create a lot of difficulty for a lot of people. Whereas Amazon raising their prices by a few cents shouldn't be much work.
It's not about the difficulty of raising prices, it's about the impact to the bottom line profit to shareholders when a few cents is extrapolated over a billion transactions.
The percent impact would be negligible, I expect lower than daily fluctuation. Anyway, the law isn't just designed to protect shareholders, it's designed to protect everyone.
If someone can make money by fraud, that money is not justification to allow fraud. The US economy relies on dependable contacts.
> Anyway, the law isn't just designed to protect shareholders,
Which law? "The Law" as an ideal, is impartial. That's irrelevant. In practice, applied law (and the cousin enforced law) leads to biased results, favoring the wealthy and the status quo while remaining "impartial".
Aspiring rich and powerful. Most people here (myself very much included) remain part of the precariat, and the fangs-out defense of the rich and powerful is most frequently done by those who, in the end, may manage to not lose but likely will not win.
Human beings are tribal creatures, not individualists.
As such, we have leaders and followers.
By definition of leaders and followers, most people will be followers, whether for genetic or environmental reasons.
Followers will always support those who are leaders. In our current society, that would mean the powerful.
If you don't believe me, look at behavioral sciences. Most people will shock someone to death just because an authority said so (yes the Millgram experiments were biased, but the results aren't completely invalidated by that)
If Amazon sends you a different product, or charges your credit card more than the claimed price, do you just simply find another retailer, or do you demand a refund?
I don't see how it should affect the speed of delivery that the Amazon employees gets paid for their time? But yeah it might affect the price - or Amazon might be able to optimize the "security check" if they have to compensate workers for the wasted time.
Money saved on labour means you can spend more money on more labour! Or you can buy more machines, or you could invest in a project to reduce packaging times, etc. etc. There's probably not a direct correlation between saving on security checks and reduced shipping time, but it's all connected. Maybe paying these wages means there's no money for more robots, so packaging things will take longer?
> Maybe paying these wages means there's no money for more robots, so packaging things will take longer?
Packing an individual box takes minutes. So it's a question of capacity, and it's pretty binary. If they have enough capacity then a large majority of items can ship within a couple hours. If they don't have enough capacity then the 90th percentile shipping time becomes indefinite/never. A situation where packaging takes an extra day, end of story, is unlikely and unstable.
And I'd say that some robots are R&D, so not having money for them has no effect on shipping times, and the rest are a cost-saving measure, so they'll always have the money.
That wouldn't be the news headline, though. The customer would find out about the cost increase via an article titled something like "Amazon increases prices by up to 20%, are your favourite purchases affected?".
I'm with you though, it costs the consumer nothing.
Labor conscious writers mean nothing if their editors (and newspaper / website / whatever) owners disagree. Ultimately the wordsmiths need to get paid, too, and they write what gets them money -- which is what their bosses want to print.
The Coalition of Immokalee Workers famously used this argument as part of their campaign for farmworkers. The argument was that fast food companies paying 1 cent more per lb. for their tomatoes would have a huge benefit for the workers picking the tomatoes, and they won.
I don't agree with it, but two day shipping is the silver bullet that separates Amazon from the competition. I don't hear these stories about Walmart or Costco's warehouses, clearly there's something about the way Amazon does business that causes these problems.
I hear a lot of horrific stuff about Walmart working, actually, including their anti-uninionizing efforts. Costco IIRC actually just plain cares for their employees and is doing well in its niche.
Not sure why you’re being downvoted here (maybe a misunderstanding of what you’re trying to say?) My takeaway from your comment is that we should first look to our own hypocrisy, i.e. we’re quick to post a comment about Amazon’s unfair labor practices, but we’re just a little quicker to click on that free 2-day prime shipping button.
Amazon gets all the attention because it's Amazon. Work a retail job anywhere and you will discover that MILLIONS of retail workers must do similar checks.
I wonder if there is any limit at all. What if the screenings were 3 hours long before and after each employee’s shift? Would the company still be allowed to not pay them during this time? Seems this is pretty abusable. How long is too long [EDIT: according to the law] to force someone to work without paying?
Employees should always be paid for their time, regardless of volunteering, or it allows employers to negatively evaluate and find parallel reasons to fire employees who don't 'choose to volunteer' as a method of institutionalized wage theft
Grossly inaccurate is the best way of describing the screening time, I've done the amazon fulfillment center tour and seen employees check in for different shifts, it does not take 25 minutes to go through the screening process. There's no way Amazon with its efficiency mantra would let this happen knowing how it eventually impacts the bottom line.
> Grossly inaccurate is the best way of describing the screening time
Amazon agrees with you... they contend that the screening doesn't actually take this long. I'm not clear on how a question of fact like this can be in dispute unless we are arguing over definitions.
> I've done the amazon fulfillment center tour and seen employees check in for different shifts, it does not take 25 minutes to go through the screening process.
No one is claiming that the check-in process takes a long time. The check-out process is the one where the employees are screened for theft, and that is where the employees claim they must wait (unpaid) for a long time.
> There's no way Amazon with its efficiency mantra would let this happen knowing how it eventually impacts the bottom line.
I find that completely unpersuasive. The courts have just told Amazon that they DON'T HAVE TO PAY for this time. So it isn't inefficient for them to allow it to take lots of time. It doesn't affect Amazon's bottom line until the point where it becomes difficult for Amazon to hire any workers.
> I find that completely unpersuasive. The courts have just told Amazon that they DON'T HAVE TO PAY for this time.
The headline is a little misleading. The appellate court was letting the case vs. Amazon go to trial under state labor law; the Supreme Court decided not to intervene, so the dispute is still being litigated.
(Previously, the Supreme Court said time being screening doesn't require compensation under Federal law).
> There's no way Amazon with its efficiency mantra would let this happen knowing how it eventually impacts the bottom line.
How do workers trying to leave the warehouse affect their bottom line? They are no longer on the clock so it is no longer Amazon's problem. It is a big problem for workers who have to waste 5-15% of their free time on this obligatory work task.
Well, Amazon also employs more people than entire industries, and has a long track record of grotesque Labour abuses, so this is just an additional data point for when people ask why amazon is awful
Sure, but the court case is only going to involve one company. In this case Amazon, which is not surprising, since their policies impact far more workers than almost any other corporation. But the result of the case impacts all the rest.
They are also obliged to arrive at the workplace, but their travel time is not necessarily compensated. At least this was put through both a judicial and legal process a long time ago in the ruling before and the Portal-to-Portal Act[0]. I do wonder why this was re-litigated; if this will change it seems like it will have to be through an act of Congress.
It is work from which the company derives value in the form of reduced shrink. Furthermore travel to and from work is at the employees discretion and direction they are free to go not only just to and from work but wherever they please and their employer can't be expected to know, care, or pay for it.
This is more akin to being locked on the company premises after work has terminated unpaid but unable to leave. If they can't do a bag check in 5 minutes and leave amazon should hire more checkers to do that work or compensate the employees for the time lost.
Perhaps the proper thing to assert is imprisonment instead of wage theft.
Employees generally choose where they live and which jobs they apply for and where, so this is not a reasonable comparison. They have no choice about these checks.
Early in your reply you say employees have a choice where they apply for jobs, then you say they have no choice on whether to apply for jobs with security measures.
They didn’t, because apparently the time requirement off the clock isn’t clearly communicated up front when they are hired. You can’t make an informed choice if you don’t have the information. This is why employment legislation is so important - otherwise employers can spring extra costs and demands on employees with impunity.
And no, it’s not acceptable to expect them to simply resign. Changing jobs can also incur significant costs on people, which can allow employers to exploit their position of power over employees.
Yes, precisely but I suspect we mean different things by disclosure.
When an employment contract talks about working hours, it should not be necessary to refer to small print or seemingly unrelated clauses to know what that means. It should have a straightforward and unsurprising meaning. Employers should not be able to make up surprising and counterintuitive definitions of things like working hours, and manipulate those in their favour. In general employees should not be required to understand special exceptions from standard expected practice, unless there are specific well understood and communicated reasons that require it.
On the face of it, I don't think this case meets that sort of standard. In general I am in favour of a high degree of flexibility in the form of employment contracts. My own working hours and the expectations of my job are somewhat unusual. I work highly variable hours and I am frequently on call. I do get paid for the hours I work though.
However I do think this is a reasonable area for legislation because I think that's the only way to ensure employees are not abused, and in this case I think it's pretty clear Amazon did not signal this clearly to prospective employees and is abusing it's position of power over them in an unreasonable way.
Changing this is up to the legislature rather than the courts. In other news, about 18% of Americans approve of congress job while about 81% disapprove of it [1].
Most Americans disapprove of Congress but approve of their Congressman/woman. Even at 18% overall approval most of the Senate & House is going to get reelected, which is why nothing changes.
The courts are very clear on other aspects of work. As any wage employee will tell you, you don't write an email if you're off the clock, you don't answer the phone if you are off the clock, and you don't do any work related task if you are off the clock. So the only question is is a bag check work related or not. And that is in the power of the courts to decide.
With that logic, my commute to work should be paid too. I'm not getting paid to drive there and they won't let me work from home.
If I'm not mistaken, airline flight attendants don't get paid until the door shuts, bet none of you that fly regularly are outraged about that.
And as someone that worked in a facility where I had to park off site, ride a bus unpaid, clear security unpaid, ride another bus unpaid then I could clock in (on time, 1 second over was late which was penalized) then had to repeat it in reverse... I was more than happy to have the job and quite fine not getting paid doing that.
Every prison guard, anyone working at UPS/USPS/FedEx sort facility, etc (not to mention people in state and federal court houses, the white house, the CIA, the FBI etc) go through this same thing every day.
Yes, my commute to work should be paid! The companies creating offices in places where the housing is affordable to CEOs only are tiresome. At my current job people are having 1 hour to 2.5 hour commutes just because the office located in the place where _nobody_ but the CEO can buy even an apartment. If they refuse to make me remote in this case or move office to more affordable places then they should pay for my commute.
I find the this whole wage debate rather interesting, because it is not only an extremely misunderstood issue, at the same times as it is a core measure of the condition of society (Please do not confuse that with a notion of "health", but rather the objective "condition" of the society, also not just the economy)
The ideal state of any economy is one in which balance of opportunities exists to the point where an equilibrium is created between employers and employees, or even the transmutation of employees into employers; where you are paid what an efficient profit seeking employer is able to pay and what you ask for as you sell your labor (encompassing all manner of work).
What we unfortunately today have, most notably in the USA, is not only a distorted, but also a deliberately and intentionally distorted labor market in which the ruling class puts immense pressure on the scales against the working class in order to manipulate the system and market, which amounts to fraud. It comes in various forms, but one of them is relevant to this issue, that being the importation of subversive labor to artificially drive down wages in order to turn the delta into profits.
That's what this story is about, as much as the immigration issue that the ruling class has convinced the "liberal" side of the political spectrum to champion, against the interest of the working people they claim to champion, and for the profit of the ruling class, whether by corporate profit or personal savings when they hire nannies, cooks, maids, landscapers, etc. about their homes.
As interesting as I find this issue in a general sense, it is also sad watching what amounts to the ruling class manipulating and deceiving and defrauding the ordinary people no differently than they have for hundreds of years, including things like convincing regular people that "immigration" is wonderful, while not explaining the fact that without immigration people would be far far better off.
Immigration is a ruling class con job, on both the origin and destination end. On the destination end it leads to things like this subject article where workers are desperately trying ad hoc procedures to untangle the gordian knot that could easily be undone by ceasing immigration, and on the originating end the destination ruling class are syphoning off human resources that could have led to the development of the originating country, while also sabotaging destination workers and people; while the origin ruling class is happy to be rid o the motivated and driven people who could likely organize and demand changes that would see their rule challenged.
I got a bit off track, but as much as I find that people have a hard time understanding that this subject issue is directly related to the exploitative and fraudulent and manipulative practice of "immigration", aka, shifting human resources around globally to serve the ruling class; I also wish I could understand why people do not seem to want to accept that reality as they fawn over the ruling class that sabotages them for personal profit, while at the same time lamenting the ruling class' exploitative nature otherwise. It's quite an odd phenomenon.
Some of the biggest employers of US “native” workers are immigrants. Some markets/industries wouldn’t exist entirely without immigrants. You can’t turn it into a black-and-white “immigration bad” summary.
Then again, it seems clear you’re not against immigration that happened decades to a century or two ago; only immigration happening after a certain class of people benefited from it for themselves, right?
Also, you do know that western countries have a birth rate less than that required for replacement, right? Without immigrants, who will pay for the “proudly native” aged populace’s social security and Medicare benefits?
Anyway, your entire rant is completely off topic and irrelevant to the court case at hand.
I will just ignore your racist self-righteousness in the pursuit of discussion, but you are exhibiting lazy thinking.
…which you then follow it up with lazy pseudo-nationalist supremacist thinking that declares the USA far more worthy of the human resources it strips from the originating countries, while sabotaging any real hope for those originating countries to develop, and sabotaging the native US population at the same time. Those other countries don't deserve to develop, the US rich need to import foreigners to augment their failure of statesmanship and governance; those foreign countries of "brown people" don't deserve those human resources, becky needs a babysitter or a new iPhone. Come one, come all "brown people" that increase profits through lower wages/salaries. And yes, I realize the exceptions of high salary foreigners are elevated as arguments for the fallacious rule.
It's really just a "pivot" of the slavery business model, just more efficient, profitable, and also less obviously unethical and immoral, so the fools can't quite catch onto it. What is always missed in the debate about slavery, is that slavery hurt the common people far more than even the salves in most cases for the very same reason that "immigration" is solely about driving up profits of the ruling class on the backs of the middle and lower class, by selling their own people out to foreign mercenary pillagers. Slavery was essentially were fed, housed, and taken care of because they represented the low wage labor necessary to drive the wealth of the ruling class; while the common people (mostly white) were not only left to their own devices to scrounge out a living in poverty and having to make their own way in life having to take care of themselves ( in spite of what spoiled brats today think, "white people" did not live a life of Club Med), they were also undermined by slavery the very same way that your support of immigration undermines citizens.
But I get it, you are self-righteous and self-interested because you have no principle and scaffold that with lazy thinking, but that does not change the fact that immigration is not only immoral and unethical, it is just basic theft. At the very least, "immigrants" should have to pay immensely higher taxes to compensate and reward citizens for what they and their forefathers created, but employers of immigrants should also have to pay immensely higher taxes, which of course they will have no problem paying since the immigrants will "do jobs Americans will not do".
No, and most people don't seem to understand what is going on, a fraud and plunder of the USA from those who created it by those who are pillaging it, including the "white" ruling class that are essentially using a Private equity leveraged buyout model to take over the USA and suck it dry, and the "immigrants" are the vehicle for doing so, because every additional "immigrant" is a marginal increase in their profit.
Please work on tightening your prose. It's hard to follow what you're trying to say.
Immigration of some forms is obviously the result of corporate pressure, you're right on that; but you could stand to make your points clearer. As it stands, your comment sounds edgy and juvenile, with scare quotes on every other thing, and too many adverbs.
This is called the single lump of labor fallacy otherwise known as the brown people are coming for my job. In your interpretation there is a finite or relatively nonelastic number of jobs and importing a bunch of people drives down the cost by substantially inflating supply.
There are multiple problems with this thought. The imports are in many relatively low paying sectors already an expected part of the market and withdrawing them would actually be the shock to the market. Americans may in some cases not be willing or legally able to pick fruit for a price that results in a price you would actually be willing to pay at the super market.
More importantly the surge in population creates jobs. The new citizens need cars, food, doctors. Their children start operations like Google that employ thousands.
I would suggest this post is more appropriate on your personal Facebook.
And here we are, utterly ignorant and navel gazing self-serving excuse making, couched in lazy thinking.
You did quite a good job of covering almost every single fallacy, including the gaslighting fake fallacy. You even covered the propaganda excuse of the noble savage you racist types never fail to trot out because you think the USA is more deserving of the "children start operations like Google" than the originating countries and societies as you drain their potential and use the exceptions of starting Google as an excuse for exploiting and sabotaging the originating countries.
You can use that racist self-righteous snark somewhere else, but reality does not change facts, no matter how much you simply parrot the gaslighting propaganda of the ruling class that loves it when self-righteous useful fools like you get all adamant about spreading their propaganda for them. It's really no different than any other propaganda hack of any other ruling class serving tools. You're no different than the Chinese hacks that are encouraged to spread the same level of pro-CCP nonsense; just as self-righteous and just as big of a fool.
There are no problems with my thought any more than when CCP propaganda spreading hacks try to gaslight people like you do.
It's embarrassing that you would even use such a lazy argument as "Americans may not be willing to work". Even your subconscious knows that it's utter nonsense, hence your use of "may". Reality is that Americans do not want to work for slave analogue wages; as was clearly evident when ICE raided the plant in the south that left the company having to hire local American workers that were then also paid higher wages.
And no, people who are not hypocritical, would have no problem paying higher wages for groceries, which would also lead to lower profits of the companies producing them, because they have to pay workers living wages, which allows them to make more money that it will cost them to buy more expensive groceries. Again, such utterly lazy and shallow lack of any thought.
I come here hoping for intelligence, yet there is little to be found.
It sounds like the post-shift screening shouldn't be necessary. If they're not paying you, you should be free to go. The worker should try opting-out of the screening: it should be an OSHA issue if you can't freely leave the building at anytime.
You can always freely leave the building. This is true for almost any business. You don't need to "opt out" of the screening - you can literally just say "I quit" and walk out.
What really needs to happen is a federal or state law modification - time under control of employer required to maintain job is time worked. Why this is for courts to legislate is silly.
The screenings are to prevent people from stealing things. There is no OSHA problem, you can leave the building through fire exits at any time, but they will set off alarms.
Is it not crazy that is has to come down to a Supreme Court case for Jeff Bezos and Amazon to treat their employees fairly?
This isn't a company that's on a sink or swim margin where this will collapse the company. Not when they're fine stocking all the break rooms in corporate offices with starbucks and AWS people get shelves full snacks all day. But give an hourly employee a little more money to accommodate their self enforced security is a line too far.
If you're an Amazon corporate employee, you support these decisions by working there.
This isn’t about salaries, or about Amazon not being able to afford to do the right thing.
Amazon has a surplus of money.. enough to buy other large corporations, like Whole Foods. And Jeff Bezos has so much money, he literally doesn’t know what to do with it.
Amazon will pay billions in legal costs before ever considering costs that actually benefit the workers.
True story: Friend saw Jeff Bezos waiting in line for 20 minutes for a pizza. He could have paid for an uber copter to drop one on him, or offered 10k to each of the people in front of him.
He didn't. He has principles, and the principle is that you work for money and then use it to buy things that you care about.
Er, how would any of the behaviors he didn't take that you refer to violate that principle? I mean, if he cares about getting pizza, either of those would have been consistent with it. You've got an example of a choice and a principle, but the choice is in no way illustrative of the principle any more than any alternative choice, including paying gunmen to murder everyone in line in front of him, would be.
Spending token amounts and effort doing small things to make things nice is often taken as a sign that staff are valued.
If work has shitty coffee I can of course bring my own but the kind of people that buy shitty coffee are often stingy in other ways that are more meaningful like raises. It might well be a good indication to look elsewhere.
If you have the luxury to think about that, you can choose not to work for Amazon in R&D. I know people who used to work for Amazon and left because they didn't like that aspect, but isn't that Amazon's problem more than anything?
Or is it even a problem? Maybe Amazon deliberately puts on their best Ebenezer Scrooge to weed out people with too much taste and not enough nose-to-grindstone.
You guys clearly think more about what messages the workplace is sending you than maybe Amazon wants their employees to. ;- )
I disagree with this decision, but Amazon are fairly well known for being one of the few big tech startups that don't have fully stocked snack supplies on every floor, and expecting staff to pay for those out of their own pocket. In all the Amazon offices I've gone to the only thing being given out for free is borderline acceptable coffee, hot water, tea bags, and milk.
I agree with the sentiment of your post and similarly find it shocking that anyone could defend a gargantuan corporation like Amazon refusing to provide their workers with reasonable wages to support quality lives.
It's worth noting that anyone who cares about this should refrain from purchasing things from the Amazons and the Walmarts of the world. The only thing these trans-human entities care about is money - that's IT. The only language they speak is money, and they will destroy the world, their human employees, and anything else that comes between them and their goal of capturing 100% of all economic power. The only thing to do is to stop feeding the beast. Don't buy shit from mega corps - no matter how convenient it is. It's unnecessary and directly helps propagate a system where sociopathic political-economic agents repress living standards for the vast majority of people so that a shockingly small number can be wealthier than kings.
>find it shocking that anyone could defend a gargantuan corporation like Amazon refusing to provide their workers with reasonable wages to support quality lives.
Amazon starts at more than double federal minimum wage... it took me a decade to make 15 dollars an hour at my job...
I'm sorry that reaching what many believe should be a minimum level of income took such a prolonged period for you and I hope that moving forward you experience an easier time growing your income.
Based on the tone of your response, I take it that you are not supportive of my criticism of Amazon et al. A question for you: do you wish for other people (including yourself in the future, your possible children, or your friends and family) to have to struggle to make an amount of money that can support their basic needs? The fact of the matter is that the current federal minimum wage is completely insufficient to meet the needs of a person attempting to make it in the modern world - even 2X the federal minimum is incredibly low given the uncertainties around health care and higher education / job training.
When a series of corporations are vacuuming up an overwhelming majority of all productivity gains and the top 0.01% are becoming wealthier than historical princes, it is very valid and important to level a critical eye at the fairness of the situation so that we can all improve together and not have our societal progress retarded by sociopathy and greed.
I do not know where you get these ideas from. Working for Amazon as a white collar guy also nothing like working for Google or any other company in California. The save money on you wherever they can. This includes getting shitty used laptops as your first device, not having extra monitors, working on a door desk, and so on.
Serious question. Kavanaugh lied during his confirmation hearing about sexually assaulting many women (https://www.salon.com/2019/09/16/republicans-know-brett-kava...). We have evidence that the POTUS, attorney general, and vice-POTUS are all complicit in international corruption (and they were major sponsors of Kavanaugh). At what point are Supreme Court decisions non-binding as the justices themselves are criminals?
I guess I can’t read English anymore. The headline to me reads that the WORKERS appeal was rejected, but it’s a ruling FOR the workers, rejecting AMAZON’s appeal.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear Amazon.com’s bid to avoid a lawsuit seeking to ensure that warehouse workers ... get paid for the time it takes them to go through extensive post-shift security screenings.
If Amazon is paying people minimum wage, then it could be argued that the extra 30 minutes would push them over the edge of minimum wage laws.
However, from what I recall of Amazon's announcement this year, they pay all warehouse workers at least $15/hr. This means they are significantly above the minimum wage requirement, even if you factor in the 30 minutes spent in security screenings.
In an ideal world, Amazon would factor in the time spent in security screenings, when advertising the job's hourly rate. Ie, workers are spending 5% of their time in security screenings, so the advertised hourly rate should be 5% lower than $15/hr. I would also like for all food-prices in restaurants to factor in taxes for the same reason, but I've thrown the towel on that fight. Ultimately, this seems like a purely cosmetic change with little substance behind it.
Ok, so the key ruling here was in 2014, which said "the Supreme Court declared that such screening procedures were not an 'integral' part of the job. Integrity’s staff at the warehouses...were hired to take products off the shelves and package them for shipment to Amazon’s customers, not to go through security screenings. The Court also found that Integrity could have eliminated the screenings without affecting the workers’ ability to complete their normal tasks." [0]
So it seems like if the security isn't integral to the job, then someone should be able to just walk out without doing the screening. Then of course they would get fired for that, and could then sue that they got fired despite the fact that the screening isn't integral to their job duties. The company would either have to claim that the security is integral, or allow others to skip it too.
Now of course, a warehouse worker doesn't have the resources to engage in such a lawsuit or live without a job while it plays out, which is what Amazon counts on here. But what if someone agreed to pay all the legal fees and pay the employee an equivalent wage to be a test case?
There was a specific law passed by congress to exempt security checks and the like from the FLSA which was essentially the basis of that 2014 ruling (mentioned briefly in the blog post you linked to). The court's hands were tied.
The Court was looking at whether screenings violated the Fair Labor Standards Act, and specifically at 245 of the Portal-to-Portal Act, which restricted the requirement to pay for pre/post work activity. I get two parts of the rationale, and it's bizarre, but I'm pretty sure the result is that even if Integrity fires you for not doing it, the work still doesn't have to be paid.
First, the Court found that performing screenings is not what employees are hired to do: they're not the point of the job, just a condition of employment. This is fairly obvious, but necessary to establish because someone who was paid to do screenings (e.g. as a physical security pen-tester) would obviously need to be paid for that.
Second, it found that those screenings are not "integral" to the job. This sounds odd for a required screening, but the context is specifically about the work of the job and not the terms of employment. Pre/post work like donning safety gear or a toolbelt is (legally or practically) necessary to complete the work, so past cases have found that it's effectively part of the labor and must be paid. This is also the context of the final holding: if Integrity could eliminate the screenings without affecting the workers' ability to pick and package goods, they must not be an intrinsic aspect of the job.
The Portal to Portal Act says that any labor which benefits the employer must be paid, while generally asserting that other pre/post work does not need to be paid, with commuting as a specific example of necessary-but-unpaid time. So "you'll get fired if you don't do it" isn't actually enough to qualify.
Perversely, the result of the act is that employers can't require unpaid, necessary tasks, but can require unpaid, unnecessary tasks. On one level, this makes sense: if putting on a toolbelt, wetsuit, or whatever else is necessary for the work, every employer will require it and failing to pay for that time is clearly harmful. But if an employer makes you recite a corporate chant before starting work, you can quit and go somewhere else. On another level, the contract system seriously distorts the logic: you can only be employed at that Amazon warehouse by fulfilling this restriction.
Ultimately, though, the court doesn't care about that. Congress passed a law which effectively says useless work time doesn't need to be paid, so this practice is legal. Which I believe holds all the way through the absurd case: if these screenings took 80 hours a week, they'd still be legal to not pay.
The Supreme Court decision related to this is being unfairly maligned in these comments, even though I'm in total agreement that the end result was bad.
I recommend reading the ruling [0] itself; it's readable and quite short, under 2,500 words.
The unanimous 2014 decision concluded that Amazon (technically, a contractor) could not be penalized under federal law for not paying workers for time spent getting through security screenings. It turned on the 1947 Portal-to-Portal Act. IANAL, but, looking at the decision, I don't see how they could have reasonably ruled any other way.
To summarize:
In the 1940s, courts had interpreted the Fair Labor Standards Act (source of the minimum wage, overtime pay, etc.) to imply very broad definitions of "work" and "workweek". This allowed mine workers to sue for back pay for all the time they spent traveling between mine portals and work areas. This wasn't consistent with pre-FLSA practice, and companies suddenly faced huge, unexpected lawsuits for back pay and damages. Congress passed the Portal-to-Portal Act explicitly to clarify the definition of time "on the clock" and prevent these lawsuits, excluding "preliminary" and "postliminary" activities.
It is this law that results in Amazon not having to pay their workers for the screenings. Quoting from Sotomayor's concurrence:
The security screenings at issue here fall on the
“preliminary . . . or postliminary” side of this line.
(*citation*) The searches were part of the process by
which the employees egressed their place of work, akin
to checking in and out and waiting in line to do so
activities that Congress clearly deemed to be
preliminary or postlimininary. See (*citation*).
Indeed, as the Court observes, the Department of Labor
reached the very same conclusion regarding similar
security screenings shortly after the Portal-to-Portal
Act was adopted
So, I believe that, obviously, Amazon should have to pay workers for these hours. But the blame for their not having to do so lies with the federal government's inability to update a 1947 law rather than with the courts.
Thanks for the accurate breakdown of this. People should not be relying on the courts to make law. If people are upset with the law being wrong then the law needs to be fixed through the legislature (Congress, or alliteratively States' Congresses)
I get why people do rely on the courts, though. Our lawmaking process is horribly broken. Major legislation doesn't get passed because it requires overwhelming control of Congress and the Whitehouse. Constitutional amendments are all but impossible when it's unlikely to get 34 state legislatures to agree on which way is North. The judiciary and executive action are the only ways left to make anything actually happen.
Ignoring the obvious immoral nature of wage theft, let’s look at the argument people keep saying “they could go work somewhere else”.
What if there aren’t any other companies they can work for, because Amazon has undercut all their competitors by, among other things, systematically engaging in wage theft.
If wage theft is helping to keep the prices down, and other businesses went bust because they were unable to compete with a large business that was ignoring the law, then that isn’t a free market economy, and the victims are now in a position where they have even less power to prevent abuse and wage theft.
The fact that the US courts seem to have decided that mandatory unpaid presence is somehow not something that violates existing Labour law is absurd.
If my booked hours are from X-Y and it takes 25 minutes for your company to get me to the door, then I should have stopped “working” at Y-25 minutes.
If you don’t want to pay me to sit around for 25 minutes you can fix your processes so that it doesn’t take 25 minutes.
Or alternatively: you aren’t permitting me to leave, your not paying me, and you don’t believe I’ve actually stolen anything (eg you’re waiting for police to come and arrest me), then that’s false imprisonment and the entire management chain involved in it should be sent to jail.
I kid of course, the management chain are the people with money contributing to politicians that are saying illegal imprisonment is awesome.
I'm surprised this hasn't come up before, isn't the US full of e.g. military installations where employees work by the hour and clock in/out, and where there's some gate check going in & out of the installation that might take a non-trivial amount of time? E.g. the CIA & NSA have such gates, and presumably the same goes for a bunch of military and security contractors.
Exactly -- can you imagine managing compensation for that time? Would you require hourly employees to have no conversations, no stopping to check their phone, on their way out of the office?
So according to this, as of April 2019, Walmart got in trouble in California for security screening in the sense that it was manditory and they were not paying for it. California requires breaks for workers and Walmart was effectively making workers use part of their break time to go through security screening.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 251 ms ] threadSo, if the appeals court overturned the dismissal, wouldn't the appeal the Supreme Court denied be to uphold it, meaning that the case should be moving forward? Such a badly worded article.
Tangentially it seems crazy they're not required to pay for the time spent going through security. If they're paid hourly and not free to go they're still on the job.
It’s an asshole move for sure. I hope they are forced to pay up, and then they will invest in streamlining the process.
It's a supreme court decision that is allowing Amazon to do this [0].
TL;DR the decision is solely on if the "activities are an intrinsic element of the employee’s primary job duties and one that cannot be skipped" and since they were "hired to retrieve products from warehouse shelves, not to undergo security screenings, and the company could eliminate the screenings altogether without impairing the employees’ ability to complete their work" Amazon/warehouse contractor didn't have to pay for it.
[0] https://www.idfa.org/news-views/headline-news/article/2014/1...
This issue boils down to whether people have to work 8 vs. 9 hours for a certain amount of pay, with some paperwork issues piled on top. It matters but there aren't any human rights involved in any meaningful way. The law isn't inherently invalid.
If you mean "hold you against your will", they can't do that.
If you mean "you have to do it to stay employed", they can.
The question here is how pay is calculated. It's not whether the security checks themselves are a problem.
Yes. Specifically, whether your employer can make you do work that they don't define as work and therefore don't pay, even though it has all the characteristics of work: Being where they tell you when they tell you doing what they tell you.
That's why this is being fought with state law, not the constitution. The federal law is doing something stupid, but the stupidity is mostly an accounting trick. Everyone is still getting paid for their total labor.
I see we won't agree here, so I'm out.
>The FLSA establishes minimum wage and overtime compensation for the time that employees work over 40 hours in one work week. Congress constructed the Act so that employers are not required to compensate employees for activities that occur before and after shifts unless those activities are integral and indispensable to the work an employee is employed to perform.
The employer will fire you for not doing it. That makes it essential.
Any interpretation of such a law that uses the job description, eg packing and moving boxes, as the be-all-end-all of what is "integral and essential" instead of what the employer will fire or refuse to employ you for not doing is either bought and paid for or anti-labor.
But seriously, could that test be any more absurd? The test should not be "of Amazon could eliminate screenings with out affecting the primary job." It should be if the employee could choose not to participate without it affecting their job.
It's the difference between voluntary and compelled.
Couldn't the Supreme Court declare the test unconstitutional?
Am I reading a Dr Seuss book or a Supreme Court decision?
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.
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.
Where I live (another country), employers are required to compensate workers for their commute (vale-transporte).
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.
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?
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).
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)
Wow. They were hired to do work, not to be locked up for half an hour per day and treated like criminals. Moreover, it is obviously clear that Amazon could just stop locking them up for half an hour per day and treating them like criminals. Therefore Amazon owes them no compensation for locking them up for half an hour per day and treating them like criminals. That is one hell of a Supreme Court ruling.
It was a unanimous decision here, because the Portal-to-Portal Act (the 1947 law referenced) has pretty consistently been interpreted both by regulatory bodies and courts in the intervening 70+ years to explicitly exclude such activities from the FLSA. If you want to change this, you definitely need to go to Congress with this.
Want change? Get Congress to change the law, because the law, as written now, permits this.
I also imagine that a lot of the people calling for the Supreme Court to make this and other decisions on the basis of whatever feels fair to the individual justices would be a lot less happy if that methodology were applied to various other things.
No, it's federal law which allows Amazon to do this.
The Supreme Court's role is not to act as a kind of super-legislature, creating and changing laws at whim: its role is to adjudicate disputes as to what the actual letter of the law requires given the facts of specific cases.
> The Congress finds that the Fair Labor Standards Act ... has been interpreted judicially in disregard of long-established customs, practices, and contracts between employers and employees, thereby creating wholly unexpected liabilities, immense in amount and retroactive in operation, upon employers with the results that, if said Act as so interpreted or claims arising under such interpretations were permitted to stand, (1) the payment of such liabilities would bring about financial ruin of many employers ...
And that's only the first of ten+ chicken-little scenarios laid out in the Congressional Findings section.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/29/251
Yes, but corporations aren't known for going out of their way not to be assholes (more accurately--not known to go above and beyond the most basic compliance with local and federal labor and employment laws).
Tech workers benefit from the high demand for tech skills, so we typically have low "asshole" behavior from companies, less we just find another job.
Other workers typically do not. Certainly non-techworkers who work for tech companies get better treatment simply based on a uniform set of policies and procedures, but often, they are employees of a contract firm, and not subject to the same treatment as the tech employees.
I'm not sure how I feel about low-skill/low-wage workers being subject to unpaid security checks.
Being paid for time they are required to fulfill duties vs "A few rotten apples spoil the bunch."
The Supreme Court (and appellate courts) are a batch system, with high throughout but poor latency. The Supreme Court reviews 7,000-8,000 petitions for certiorari each year, rendering judgment in the merits after oral argument on about 80-100 cases per year. Each case typically has hundreds of pages of briefing, rulings below, etc., and requires reference to hundreds of additional pages of precedent and other authorities. All that is done by the nine justices, each with the assistance of four clerks.
Personally I think the system works great but I’ve never been a “too down” style person anyway.
That's what this line refers to: petitions for cert are requests to have the Court hear a case. They only accept ~10%.
They should not be able to “clock out” until after such security checks.
I'm very libertarian- but at the end of the day I will always support the government authority to punish theft. And a failure to pay employees the agreed upon rate is theft.
This isnt about being caught- the evidence is clear as day and was presented in court.
This is about a failure of our legal system to protect basic rights of a laborer to be paid the agreed upon rate.
If someone can make money by fraud, that money is not justification to allow fraud. The US economy relies on dependable contacts.
Which law? "The Law" as an ideal, is impartial. That's irrelevant. In practice, applied law (and the cousin enforced law) leads to biased results, favoring the wealthy and the status quo while remaining "impartial".
We shouldn't let a defeatist attitude discourage attempts at improvement.
Why are people so quick to defend the powerful?
John Steinbeck wasn't wrong.
As such, we have leaders and followers.
By definition of leaders and followers, most people will be followers, whether for genetic or environmental reasons.
Followers will always support those who are leaders. In our current society, that would mean the powerful.
If you don't believe me, look at behavioral sciences. Most people will shock someone to death just because an authority said so (yes the Millgram experiments were biased, but the results aren't completely invalidated by that)
It's not like Amazon is running a zero sum balance sheet here. They have profits this could take out of and maintain all their service and speed.
Packing an individual box takes minutes. So it's a question of capacity, and it's pretty binary. If they have enough capacity then a large majority of items can ship within a couple hours. If they don't have enough capacity then the 90th percentile shipping time becomes indefinite/never. A situation where packaging takes an extra day, end of story, is unlikely and unstable.
And I'd say that some robots are R&D, so not having money for them has no effect on shipping times, and the rest are a cost-saving measure, so they'll always have the money.
I'm with you though, it costs the consumer nothing.
Framing it that way, of course people would respond negatively to price increases.
"Amazon workers now paid for all the time they're clocked in, prices may be affected" is a lot more sympathetic to workers.
Please refer to this documentary about Walmart. They're not just anti-labor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wal-Mart:_The_High_Cost_of_Low...
While Walmart didn't invent bad behavior, they're pretty good at it.
If I wanted to take law into my own hands I might as well go to the local gangsters and smugglers.
2. The article says "the screening takes around 25 minutes to complete", which is not typical in retail.
0.00hr. You should always be paid for your time unless that person agrees to volunteer it.
Amazon agrees with you... they contend that the screening doesn't actually take this long. I'm not clear on how a question of fact like this can be in dispute unless we are arguing over definitions.
> I've done the amazon fulfillment center tour and seen employees check in for different shifts, it does not take 25 minutes to go through the screening process.
No one is claiming that the check-in process takes a long time. The check-out process is the one where the employees are screened for theft, and that is where the employees claim they must wait (unpaid) for a long time.
> There's no way Amazon with its efficiency mantra would let this happen knowing how it eventually impacts the bottom line.
I find that completely unpersuasive. The courts have just told Amazon that they DON'T HAVE TO PAY for this time. So it isn't inefficient for them to allow it to take lots of time. It doesn't affect Amazon's bottom line until the point where it becomes difficult for Amazon to hire any workers.
The headline is a little misleading. The appellate court was letting the case vs. Amazon go to trial under state labor law; the Supreme Court decided not to intervene, so the dispute is still being litigated.
(Previously, the Supreme Court said time being screening doesn't require compensation under Federal law).
I'd be skeptical of how representative a tour is.
> seen employees check in for different shifts, it does not take 25 minutes to go through the screening process
Check-in isn't the situation in dispute.
How do workers trying to leave the warehouse affect their bottom line? They are no longer on the clock so it is no longer Amazon's problem. It is a big problem for workers who have to waste 5-15% of their free time on this obligatory work task.
Looks like they had similar issues?
https://www.plbsh.com/jury-awards-walmart-employees-6-millio...
[0]: https://content.next.westlaw.com/6-508-0673?transitionType=D...
This is more akin to being locked on the company premises after work has terminated unpaid but unable to leave. If they can't do a bag check in 5 minutes and leave amazon should hire more checkers to do that work or compensate the employees for the time lost.
Perhaps the proper thing to assert is imprisonment instead of wage theft.
Regardless of the philosophy, what do you think of the legal basis?
And no, it’s not acceptable to expect them to simply resign. Changing jobs can also incur significant costs on people, which can allow employers to exploit their position of power over employees.
When an employment contract talks about working hours, it should not be necessary to refer to small print or seemingly unrelated clauses to know what that means. It should have a straightforward and unsurprising meaning. Employers should not be able to make up surprising and counterintuitive definitions of things like working hours, and manipulate those in their favour. In general employees should not be required to understand special exceptions from standard expected practice, unless there are specific well understood and communicated reasons that require it.
On the face of it, I don't think this case meets that sort of standard. In general I am in favour of a high degree of flexibility in the form of employment contracts. My own working hours and the expectations of my job are somewhat unusual. I work highly variable hours and I am frequently on call. I do get paid for the hours I work though.
However I do think this is a reasonable area for legislation because I think that's the only way to ensure employees are not abused, and in this case I think it's pretty clear Amazon did not signal this clearly to prospective employees and is abusing it's position of power over them in an unreasonable way.
[1] https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/congressional...!
(Scroll down) https://news.gallup.com/poll/1600/congress-public.aspx
If I'm not mistaken, airline flight attendants don't get paid until the door shuts, bet none of you that fly regularly are outraged about that.
And as someone that worked in a facility where I had to park off site, ride a bus unpaid, clear security unpaid, ride another bus unpaid then I could clock in (on time, 1 second over was late which was penalized) then had to repeat it in reverse... I was more than happy to have the job and quite fine not getting paid doing that.
Every prison guard, anyone working at UPS/USPS/FedEx sort facility, etc (not to mention people in state and federal court houses, the white house, the CIA, the FBI etc) go through this same thing every day.
One is semi-optional, the other is mandatory.
It was just horse shit to get free labour out of people, but that seems to be the industry.
The ideal state of any economy is one in which balance of opportunities exists to the point where an equilibrium is created between employers and employees, or even the transmutation of employees into employers; where you are paid what an efficient profit seeking employer is able to pay and what you ask for as you sell your labor (encompassing all manner of work).
What we unfortunately today have, most notably in the USA, is not only a distorted, but also a deliberately and intentionally distorted labor market in which the ruling class puts immense pressure on the scales against the working class in order to manipulate the system and market, which amounts to fraud. It comes in various forms, but one of them is relevant to this issue, that being the importation of subversive labor to artificially drive down wages in order to turn the delta into profits.
That's what this story is about, as much as the immigration issue that the ruling class has convinced the "liberal" side of the political spectrum to champion, against the interest of the working people they claim to champion, and for the profit of the ruling class, whether by corporate profit or personal savings when they hire nannies, cooks, maids, landscapers, etc. about their homes.
As interesting as I find this issue in a general sense, it is also sad watching what amounts to the ruling class manipulating and deceiving and defrauding the ordinary people no differently than they have for hundreds of years, including things like convincing regular people that "immigration" is wonderful, while not explaining the fact that without immigration people would be far far better off.
Immigration is a ruling class con job, on both the origin and destination end. On the destination end it leads to things like this subject article where workers are desperately trying ad hoc procedures to untangle the gordian knot that could easily be undone by ceasing immigration, and on the originating end the destination ruling class are syphoning off human resources that could have led to the development of the originating country, while also sabotaging destination workers and people; while the origin ruling class is happy to be rid o the motivated and driven people who could likely organize and demand changes that would see their rule challenged.
I got a bit off track, but as much as I find that people have a hard time understanding that this subject issue is directly related to the exploitative and fraudulent and manipulative practice of "immigration", aka, shifting human resources around globally to serve the ruling class; I also wish I could understand why people do not seem to want to accept that reality as they fawn over the ruling class that sabotages them for personal profit, while at the same time lamenting the ruling class' exploitative nature otherwise. It's quite an odd phenomenon.
Then again, it seems clear you’re not against immigration that happened decades to a century or two ago; only immigration happening after a certain class of people benefited from it for themselves, right?
Also, you do know that western countries have a birth rate less than that required for replacement, right? Without immigrants, who will pay for the “proudly native” aged populace’s social security and Medicare benefits?
Anyway, your entire rant is completely off topic and irrelevant to the court case at hand.
…which you then follow it up with lazy pseudo-nationalist supremacist thinking that declares the USA far more worthy of the human resources it strips from the originating countries, while sabotaging any real hope for those originating countries to develop, and sabotaging the native US population at the same time. Those other countries don't deserve to develop, the US rich need to import foreigners to augment their failure of statesmanship and governance; those foreign countries of "brown people" don't deserve those human resources, becky needs a babysitter or a new iPhone. Come one, come all "brown people" that increase profits through lower wages/salaries. And yes, I realize the exceptions of high salary foreigners are elevated as arguments for the fallacious rule.
It's really just a "pivot" of the slavery business model, just more efficient, profitable, and also less obviously unethical and immoral, so the fools can't quite catch onto it. What is always missed in the debate about slavery, is that slavery hurt the common people far more than even the salves in most cases for the very same reason that "immigration" is solely about driving up profits of the ruling class on the backs of the middle and lower class, by selling their own people out to foreign mercenary pillagers. Slavery was essentially were fed, housed, and taken care of because they represented the low wage labor necessary to drive the wealth of the ruling class; while the common people (mostly white) were not only left to their own devices to scrounge out a living in poverty and having to make their own way in life having to take care of themselves ( in spite of what spoiled brats today think, "white people" did not live a life of Club Med), they were also undermined by slavery the very same way that your support of immigration undermines citizens.
But I get it, you are self-righteous and self-interested because you have no principle and scaffold that with lazy thinking, but that does not change the fact that immigration is not only immoral and unethical, it is just basic theft. At the very least, "immigrants" should have to pay immensely higher taxes to compensate and reward citizens for what they and their forefathers created, but employers of immigrants should also have to pay immensely higher taxes, which of course they will have no problem paying since the immigrants will "do jobs Americans will not do".
No, and most people don't seem to understand what is going on, a fraud and plunder of the USA from those who created it by those who are pillaging it, including the "white" ruling class that are essentially using a Private equity leveraged buyout model to take over the USA and suck it dry, and the "immigrants" are the vehicle for doing so, because every additional "immigrant" is a marginal increase in their profit.
Immigration of some forms is obviously the result of corporate pressure, you're right on that; but you could stand to make your points clearer. As it stands, your comment sounds edgy and juvenile, with scare quotes on every other thing, and too many adverbs.
There are multiple problems with this thought. The imports are in many relatively low paying sectors already an expected part of the market and withdrawing them would actually be the shock to the market. Americans may in some cases not be willing or legally able to pick fruit for a price that results in a price you would actually be willing to pay at the super market.
More importantly the surge in population creates jobs. The new citizens need cars, food, doctors. Their children start operations like Google that employ thousands.
I would suggest this post is more appropriate on your personal Facebook.
You did quite a good job of covering almost every single fallacy, including the gaslighting fake fallacy. You even covered the propaganda excuse of the noble savage you racist types never fail to trot out because you think the USA is more deserving of the "children start operations like Google" than the originating countries and societies as you drain their potential and use the exceptions of starting Google as an excuse for exploiting and sabotaging the originating countries.
You can use that racist self-righteous snark somewhere else, but reality does not change facts, no matter how much you simply parrot the gaslighting propaganda of the ruling class that loves it when self-righteous useful fools like you get all adamant about spreading their propaganda for them. It's really no different than any other propaganda hack of any other ruling class serving tools. You're no different than the Chinese hacks that are encouraged to spread the same level of pro-CCP nonsense; just as self-righteous and just as big of a fool.
There are no problems with my thought any more than when CCP propaganda spreading hacks try to gaslight people like you do.
It's embarrassing that you would even use such a lazy argument as "Americans may not be willing to work". Even your subconscious knows that it's utter nonsense, hence your use of "may". Reality is that Americans do not want to work for slave analogue wages; as was clearly evident when ICE raided the plant in the south that left the company having to hire local American workers that were then also paid higher wages.
And no, people who are not hypocritical, would have no problem paying higher wages for groceries, which would also lead to lower profits of the companies producing them, because they have to pay workers living wages, which allows them to make more money that it will cost them to buy more expensive groceries. Again, such utterly lazy and shallow lack of any thought.
I come here hoping for intelligence, yet there is little to be found.
Fortunately Nevada is taking a stand against slavery that the US Supreme Court refused to do in 2014.
Why in the world would that be an OSHA issue?
What really needs to happen is a federal or state law modification - time under control of employer required to maintain job is time worked. Why this is for courts to legislate is silly.
This isn't a company that's on a sink or swim margin where this will collapse the company. Not when they're fine stocking all the break rooms in corporate offices with starbucks and AWS people get shelves full snacks all day. But give an hourly employee a little more money to accommodate their self enforced security is a line too far.
If you're an Amazon corporate employee, you support these decisions by working there.
Amazon has a surplus of money.. enough to buy other large corporations, like Whole Foods. And Jeff Bezos has so much money, he literally doesn’t know what to do with it.
Amazon will pay billions in legal costs before ever considering costs that actually benefit the workers.
He didn't. He has principles, and the principle is that you work for money and then use it to buy things that you care about.
It's pretty much a factory for software developers.
A live-able salary is the only perk of being an Amazon corporate employee.
Yes, that is how employment works, and the compensation is better than livable for those who would make that elsewhere.
After you are a toddler, and once you are rich, do you need permission to buy snacks?
If work has shitty coffee I can of course bring my own but the kind of people that buy shitty coffee are often stingy in other ways that are more meaningful like raises. It might well be a good indication to look elsewhere.
Or is it even a problem? Maybe Amazon deliberately puts on their best Ebenezer Scrooge to weed out people with too much taste and not enough nose-to-grindstone.
You guys clearly think more about what messages the workplace is sending you than maybe Amazon wants their employees to. ;- )
It's worth noting that anyone who cares about this should refrain from purchasing things from the Amazons and the Walmarts of the world. The only thing these trans-human entities care about is money - that's IT. The only language they speak is money, and they will destroy the world, their human employees, and anything else that comes between them and their goal of capturing 100% of all economic power. The only thing to do is to stop feeding the beast. Don't buy shit from mega corps - no matter how convenient it is. It's unnecessary and directly helps propagate a system where sociopathic political-economic agents repress living standards for the vast majority of people so that a shockingly small number can be wealthier than kings.
Amazon starts at more than double federal minimum wage... it took me a decade to make 15 dollars an hour at my job...
Based on the tone of your response, I take it that you are not supportive of my criticism of Amazon et al. A question for you: do you wish for other people (including yourself in the future, your possible children, or your friends and family) to have to struggle to make an amount of money that can support their basic needs? The fact of the matter is that the current federal minimum wage is completely insufficient to meet the needs of a person attempting to make it in the modern world - even 2X the federal minimum is incredibly low given the uncertainties around health care and higher education / job training.
When a series of corporations are vacuuming up an overwhelming majority of all productivity gains and the top 0.01% are becoming wealthier than historical princes, it is very valid and important to level a critical eye at the fairness of the situation so that we can all improve together and not have our societal progress retarded by sociopathy and greed.
https://blog.aboutamazon.com/working-at-amazon/how-a-door-be...
It's better than supporting mass surveillance by working at Google or Facebook I'd think, if you compare to the alternative FAANG companies.
Amazon Rejected by U.S. Supreme Court on Pay Claims by Workers
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-07/amazon-re...
Also we could also talk about: dry clean suits, taking showers, cutting hair, shaving, putting on make-up, etc.
Moreover, why not just make the workers salaried so they can’t complain?
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear Amazon.com’s bid to avoid a lawsuit seeking to ensure that warehouse workers ... get paid for the time it takes them to go through extensive post-shift security screenings.
However, from what I recall of Amazon's announcement this year, they pay all warehouse workers at least $15/hr. This means they are significantly above the minimum wage requirement, even if you factor in the 30 minutes spent in security screenings.
In an ideal world, Amazon would factor in the time spent in security screenings, when advertising the job's hourly rate. Ie, workers are spending 5% of their time in security screenings, so the advertised hourly rate should be 5% lower than $15/hr. I would also like for all food-prices in restaurants to factor in taxes for the same reason, but I've thrown the towel on that fight. Ultimately, this seems like a purely cosmetic change with little substance behind it.
So it seems like if the security isn't integral to the job, then someone should be able to just walk out without doing the screening. Then of course they would get fired for that, and could then sue that they got fired despite the fact that the screening isn't integral to their job duties. The company would either have to claim that the security is integral, or allow others to skip it too.
Now of course, a warehouse worker doesn't have the resources to engage in such a lawsuit or live without a job while it plays out, which is what Amazon counts on here. But what if someone agreed to pay all the legal fees and pay the employee an equivalent wage to be a test case?
[0] https://www.scotusblog.com/2014/12/no-overtime-pay-for-after...
First, the Court found that performing screenings is not what employees are hired to do: they're not the point of the job, just a condition of employment. This is fairly obvious, but necessary to establish because someone who was paid to do screenings (e.g. as a physical security pen-tester) would obviously need to be paid for that.
Second, it found that those screenings are not "integral" to the job. This sounds odd for a required screening, but the context is specifically about the work of the job and not the terms of employment. Pre/post work like donning safety gear or a toolbelt is (legally or practically) necessary to complete the work, so past cases have found that it's effectively part of the labor and must be paid. This is also the context of the final holding: if Integrity could eliminate the screenings without affecting the workers' ability to pick and package goods, they must not be an intrinsic aspect of the job.
The Portal to Portal Act says that any labor which benefits the employer must be paid, while generally asserting that other pre/post work does not need to be paid, with commuting as a specific example of necessary-but-unpaid time. So "you'll get fired if you don't do it" isn't actually enough to qualify.
Perversely, the result of the act is that employers can't require unpaid, necessary tasks, but can require unpaid, unnecessary tasks. On one level, this makes sense: if putting on a toolbelt, wetsuit, or whatever else is necessary for the work, every employer will require it and failing to pay for that time is clearly harmful. But if an employer makes you recite a corporate chant before starting work, you can quit and go somewhere else. On another level, the contract system seriously distorts the logic: you can only be employed at that Amazon warehouse by fulfilling this restriction.
Ultimately, though, the court doesn't care about that. Congress passed a law which effectively says useless work time doesn't need to be paid, so this practice is legal. Which I believe holds all the way through the absurd case: if these screenings took 80 hours a week, they'd still be legal to not pay.
I recommend reading the ruling [0] itself; it's readable and quite short, under 2,500 words.
The unanimous 2014 decision concluded that Amazon (technically, a contractor) could not be penalized under federal law for not paying workers for time spent getting through security screenings. It turned on the 1947 Portal-to-Portal Act. IANAL, but, looking at the decision, I don't see how they could have reasonably ruled any other way.
To summarize:
In the 1940s, courts had interpreted the Fair Labor Standards Act (source of the minimum wage, overtime pay, etc.) to imply very broad definitions of "work" and "workweek". This allowed mine workers to sue for back pay for all the time they spent traveling between mine portals and work areas. This wasn't consistent with pre-FLSA practice, and companies suddenly faced huge, unexpected lawsuits for back pay and damages. Congress passed the Portal-to-Portal Act explicitly to clarify the definition of time "on the clock" and prevent these lawsuits, excluding "preliminary" and "postliminary" activities.
It is this law that results in Amazon not having to pay their workers for the screenings. Quoting from Sotomayor's concurrence:
So, I believe that, obviously, Amazon should have to pay workers for these hours. But the blame for their not having to do so lies with the federal government's inability to update a 1947 law rather than with the courts.What if there aren’t any other companies they can work for, because Amazon has undercut all their competitors by, among other things, systematically engaging in wage theft.
If wage theft is helping to keep the prices down, and other businesses went bust because they were unable to compete with a large business that was ignoring the law, then that isn’t a free market economy, and the victims are now in a position where they have even less power to prevent abuse and wage theft.
The fact that the US courts seem to have decided that mandatory unpaid presence is somehow not something that violates existing Labour law is absurd.
If my booked hours are from X-Y and it takes 25 minutes for your company to get me to the door, then I should have stopped “working” at Y-25 minutes.
If you don’t want to pay me to sit around for 25 minutes you can fix your processes so that it doesn’t take 25 minutes.
Or alternatively: you aren’t permitting me to leave, your not paying me, and you don’t believe I’ve actually stolen anything (eg you’re waiting for police to come and arrest me), then that’s false imprisonment and the entire management chain involved in it should be sent to jail.
I kid of course, the management chain are the people with money contributing to politicians that are saying illegal imprisonment is awesome.
https://www.plbsh.com/jury-awards-walmart-employees-6-millio...
I suppose that's not exactly the same since it only covers security time eating into break time not, after work time.