Amazon Workers Take Security Check Woes to Supreme Court

Every day, at the end of their shifts, Amazon warehouse workers line up for an airport-style security check that screens them for stolen goods. It can take as long as 25 minutes. And they don't get paid a single cent for the wait.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court grappled with whether or not workers should be compensated for this mandatory activity.

SCOTUS Blog reported: 

When the warehouse workers' lawyer, Reno attorney Mark R. Thierman, took the lectern, he made an effort to simplify the issues. The Court should start, he said, with the question "Is this work?" If the answer to that is yes, then ask: "Is it for the employer's benefit?" If the answer to that is yes, that's as far as the Court needs to go: the task is deserving of extra pay. It would never be necessary to answer whether the added task was closely enough tied to the worker's "primary activity," he said.

Thierman's argument seemed to grow stronger the longer it went, and he made what might be a telling point in noting that, in this case, the workers actually had punched out for the day before the screening began.

Amazon warehouse workers in Germany, with the support of the 2-million member union ver.di, protest for bargaining rights.

"Employers," he said, "make people do all kinds of things that don't make sense," and that should be a part of the legal understanding about paying for what one demands. "If an employer tells you to stay at work until 8 o'clock at night, you stay," he said, but you are entitled to pay for the added time, even if you aren't doing a thing.

The court will now begin deliberating on a decision. If the workers win, "Amazon and various staffing agencies it uses could be required to pay as many as 400,000 workers back wages amounting to $100 million or more," according to Bloomberg news reports.

In February, CWAers and other activists rallied outside Amazon's worldwide headquarters in Seattle to show their solidarity with German Amazon workers who have been carrying out rolling strikes since May 2013 to push Amazon to negotiate with ver.di.