In a recent Supreme Court decision, Integrity Staffing Solutions, Inc. v. Busk, the justices unanimously ruled that workers who are required to stay after their normal hours on the job to undergo a security screening are not entitled to overtime pay while they wait for that process and then go through the screening.  Their decision overturned the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals' decision. Integrity Staffing Solutions required its hourly warehouse workers, who retrieved products from warehouse shelves and packaged them for delivery to Amazon.com customers, to undergo a security screening before leaving the warehouse each day. The former employees, sued the company alleging that they were entitled to compensation under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA) for the roughly 25 minutes each day that they spent waiting to undergo and undergoing those screenings. They also alleged that the company could have reduced that time to a de minimis amount by adding screeners or staggering shift termina- tions and that the screenings were conducted to prevent employee theft and, thus, for the sole benefit of the employers and their customers.

The Supreme Court looked to the Portal-to-Portal Act which exempts employers from FLSA liability for claims based on “activities which are preliminary to or postliminary to” the performance of the principal activities that an employee is employed to perform. §254(a)(2). Under this Court’s precedents, the term “principal activities” includes all activities which are an “integral and indispensable part of the principal activities.” Steiner v. Mitchell, 350 U. S. 247, 252–253. An activity is “integral and indispensable” if it is an intrinsic element of the employee’s principal activities and one with which the employee cannot dispense if he is to perform his principal activities. 

The security screenings at issue are noncompensable postliminary activities. 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. The Court referred to 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. The Court also determined that the employees' claim that the screenings are compensable because Integrity Staffing could have reduced the time to a de minimis amount is better presented at the bargaining table, not to a court in a wage and hour claim.