Posted on 12/09/2014 5:16:59 PM PST by SMGFan
Two months ago, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in the case of Integrity Staffing Solutions c. Busk et al., concerning the question of whether employees at a warehousean Amazon distribution center, in this caseshould be paid for the time that they spend waiting for security checks when they leave work. The Supremes issued a unanimous decision earlier than expected, and they say that security checks should not be considered part of the job at a distribution center
(Excerpt) Read more at consumerist.com ...
I was surprised the bleeding-heart liberals appointed by Obama went along with this. It shows where their hearts really are, I guess.
Nitwits
This is a correct interpretation. Being that security is a requirement to perform the task they are paid to do, NOT a direct task they are paid to do.
For example, if you are required to pass a physical examination, you would not necessarily be paid to sit in a physicians office.
Also, you are not paid for your time driving back and forth to work, even though you are required to work at a specific place.
Correct ruling.
Let’s go a bit further. My 8 hours of sleep is required to do good at work. Should I get paid for that? No,but as long as I am not free to exit my place of employment, per requirement, I should get paid for it. This is bizarro.
That's a somewhat different issue. Unless the work clothes are company property (which isn't indicated by the description), the workers could choose to just go home without changing or showering. The Amazon workers in the present case do not have any such choice, and in the view of rational people (as opposed to the clowns on the bench) are clearly "on the clock".
And they do a lot of damage to America -- it creates (perfectly justified) resentment that creates (unjustified, but inevitable) fertile ground for leftist anti-business propaganda.
What a bunch of whiners. "Waaaah, I hadda stand in line to punch my time clock and I didn't get paaaiiiddd for those two minutes! Waaaah!"
“8 hours of sleep”
I hired a part-time guy on an as-needed basis. I had him keep track of his hours (and I did too). His first invoice had the miles and hours to get to my house to do the work. I had never thought of that - paid the first time, told him “that’s not how it works” for the subsequent jobs.
My son uses his car for work (first job) sometimes going from the company to various places running errands. And gets his mileage and tolls comped - and he is on the clock of course.
But he told me he was putting his tolls in to get reimbursed just to drive to work. I told him that was wrong. “But the boss told me to submit any tolls I had.”
“Um - son - I’m pretty sure he didn’t mean the $6 a day just for you to go back and forth to work.”
They can quit, but they aren’t likely to find work as easily as Amazon’s staffing agency can find a replacement or for Amazon to replace the staffing agency.
That is known to the individuals working at Amazon, the staffing agency, and Amazon itself. Absent inordinately good conditions, that can set up strange incentives to treat the staff with a certain degree of contempt and distrust.
For what incentives exist to set things up this way, I would be surprised to hear of genuine (read: not PR-driven) examples to the contrary. That is, somewhere that values their employees and agency help in ways that positively incentivize someone to want to work there (read: in ways other than it being the only thing available).
How exactly are unions supposed to overturn the Supreme Court?
They required safety equipment included boots, belt and lanyard, hard hat and lamp. You wouldn’t want to get in your car after a shift with the mud, grease, and dirt which covered you. The contract covered pay from the time you got on the cage, ready for work, until you returned to the surface. It was a negotiated work rule.
Not only are the Supremes wrongly legislating this issue from the bench imo, but the Supremes are usurping 10th Amendment-protective state legislative powers to do so.
Again, I suggest that they quit if they don’t like working there. Spare the intellectualizing. If they can’t keep employees they will change their methods and practices.
11:25 rolls around and the safety guy (sitting in his truck the entire time), comes over and says “You guys ready to go to lunch?”
Turns out their union rules required an hour lunch at the cafeteria. A half-hour one-way trip from where we were working. And he was off at 5 pm sharp - which meant leaving the site at 4:15 pm.
We did get things figured out so he could eat on-site and work overtime. But the first two days was crazy!
Does Amazon pay their workers when they are using their cell phone and texting during work hours?
I once timed a worker when he was working for me and answering his cell phone every time it beeped. The total accumulated time on any given day was between 30 to 45 minutes. Why should an employer pay for that time?
When the workers are going through the security check, how many are NOT on using a cell
Do you ever wonder why you have to work to open and snip off so many security measures in packaging, before you can open a packaged product?
Employee thefts at the manufacturing, shipping and retail stages are the primary reasons.
If only our government was subjected to the same scrutiny, a certain Democrat official would have been stopped before he was able to leave a supposedly secure facility with classified documents stuffed in his socks...
If you don’tike the conditions and want to be paid for securityy check, GO WORK SOMEWHERE ELSE!!!!
Virtually none of them are on a cell phone for the simple reason that you don't bring them into the facility past the security check point.
That is why good management and morale work hand in hand to prevent that from happening. If you make it a place that someone wants to work, even for the short term, that goes a long way to preempting that resentment.
Besides, if someone’s quite happy at their job, has no (or very little) complaints, and sees the value in doing well in their work, wouldn’t that work well towards productivity and profitability?
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