Earlier quoted context omitted.
Criminal behavior doesn't inherently disqualify you from being a judge.
Wait, really?
It's impeachable, but you'd need to actually impeach him.
U.S. Supreme Court rejects Amazon warehouse worker wage appeal
181–190 of 210 posts
Re: U.S. Supreme Court rejects Amazon warehouse worker wage appeal
#182It 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.
When I worked at Shaw Communications in Canada we were required to work before we started getting paid as we had to be "ready to perform our duties".
It was just horse shit to get free labour out of people, but that seems to be the industry.
Re: U.S. Supreme Court rejects Amazon warehouse worker wage appeal
#183It 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.
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 co…
Employees can choose--in most cases--how far away to live. Employees have no control whatsoever about standing in line to leave the warehouse.
One is semi-optional, the other is mandatory.
Re: U.S. Supreme Court rejects Amazon warehouse worker wage appeal
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Lawyer is a weird job.
There's a reason tabletop gamers call it "rules lawyering".
Re: U.S. Supreme Court rejects Amazon warehouse worker wage appeal
#185Earlier 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…
> 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.
Re: U.S. Supreme Court rejects Amazon warehouse worker wage appeal
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
It's still less then a 1/3 as many employees as Walmart Looks like they had similar issues? https://www.plbsh.com/jury-awards-walmart-employees-6-millio...
The workers in this case were employed by a contractor to Amazon. They were not Amazon employees.
Re: U.S. Supreme Court rejects Amazon warehouse worker wage appeal
#187Ok, 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 w…
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.
Re: U.S. Supreme Court rejects Amazon warehouse worker wage appeal
#188The 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 s…
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.
Re: U.S. Supreme Court rejects Amazon warehouse worker wage appeal
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or just a̶s̶s̶u̶m̶e̶ be vigilant about it, corporations are amoral profit machines and have no incentive to care about replaceable workers.
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.
You're neglecting to consider that you have to be caught.
Re: U.S. Supreme Court rejects Amazon warehouse worker wage appeal
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You're neglecting to consider that you have to be caught.
Amazon was just being tried in court.
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.