U.S. Supreme Court rejects Amazon warehouse worker wage appeal

Post by Supermancho » Mon, Oct 07, 2019, 7:10 PM UTC

Buge wrote: post #132

mikelyons wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by soledades » Mon, Oct 07, 2019, 7:15 PM UTC

microcolonel wrote: post #98

michaelmrose wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Post by ClumsyPilot » Mon, Oct 07, 2019, 7:20 PM UTC

travisjungroth wrote: post #22

rtkwe wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

Post by JackFr » Mon, Oct 07, 2019, 7:26 PM UTC

azernik wrote: post #60

JackFr wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by moomin » Mon, Oct 07, 2019, 7:32 PM UTC

FPGAhacker wrote: post #5

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.