Supreme Court Rules Amazon Workers Don’t Have to Be Paid for Security Checks

The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that workers in Amazon’s warehouses don’t have to be paid for the time they spend waiting in security screening lines after their shifts end.

The 9-0 ruling reverses a federal appeals court ruling in 2013 which found that workers should be paid during the waiting time because the screenings were a necessary part of their jobs that benefited their employer, Mashable reports. But the Supreme Court said that because the security screenings were not part of the tasks employees had been hired to perform—picking up products from shelves in Amazon’s massive warehouses—workers did not have to be paid for the time spent in line.

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“The security screenings at issue are noncompensable postliminary activities,” the Justices wrote. “The workers were employed not to undergo security screenings but to retrieve products from warehouse shelves and package them for shipment.”

Workers for Integrity Staffing Solutions, an Amazon contractor, had said they had to wait as long as 25 minutes in security screening lines after work before they could leave the warehouses. But an Amazon spokesperson said the screenings require “little or no wait.”

[Mashable]