Labor – FLSA — overtime

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U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit

Civil

Labor – FLSA — overtime

Time spent donning and doffing gear during lunch breaks is not compensable overtime.

“Common sense has a place in adjudication. What could be more absurd than to require as a matter of interpretation of the Fair Labor Standards Act that donning and doffing times during lunch breaks be measured daily for each poultry worker for purposes of calculating overtime pay (a modest fraction of an hour’s wage) due each worker twice every day? For the employer to try to quantify that time, across numerous employees and numerous days of work, other than by statistical sampling methods suggested by neither side in this case, would be an undertaking at once onerous and futile. Nor is having to change inconsistent with the plaintiffs’ having been ‘completely relieved from duty’ during their lunch break, 29 C.F.R. § 785.19(a), considering how remote from this simple changing are the ‘duties’ listed in the regulation: ‘an office employee who is required to eat at his desk or a factory worker who is required to be at his machine.’”

Affirmed.

13-2115 Mitchell v. JCG Industries Inc.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Dow, J., Posner, J.