Employment — FLSA

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U.S. Supreme Court

Civil

Employment — FLSA

The time that employees spent waiting to undergo and undergoing security screenings is not compensable under the FLSA.

The security screenings at issue are noncompensable postliminary activities. To begin with, the screenings were not the principal activities the employees were employed to perform—i.e., the workers were employed not to undergo security screenings but to retrieve products from warehouse shelves and package them for shipment. Nor were they “integral and indispensable” to those activities. This view is consistent with a 1951 Department of Labor opinion letter, which found noncompensable under the Portal-to-Portal Act both a preshift screening conducted for employee safety and a postshift search conducted to prevent employee theft. The Ninth Circuit’s test, which focused on whether the particular activity was required by the employer rather than whether it was tied to the productive work that the employee was employed to perform, would sweep into “principal activities” the very activities that the Portal-to-Portal Act was designed to exclude from compensation. See, e.g., IBP, supra, at 41. Finally, respondents’ claim that the screenings are compensable because Integrity Staffing could have reduced the time to a de minimis amount is properly presented at the bargaining table, not to a court in an FLSA claim.

713 F. 3d 525, reversed.

13-433 Integrity Staffing solutions, Inc., v. Busk

Thomas, J.; Sotomayor, J., concurring.

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