Pay issue clarified
on Nov 8, 2005 at 10:05 am
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Tuesday that workers are entitled to wages for the time it takes them to walk to their work stations from the place where they don required clothing and obtain necessary tools. But, the Court also ruled that the waiting time, before donning or obtaining gear, is not covered by federal wage and hour law. The issue arose in two meat-packing cases, IBP v. Alvarez (03-1238) and Tum v. Barber Foods (04-66).
The ruling cleared up a split among lower courts on the walking and waiting time questions — questions that arise with great frequency under the Fair Labor Standards Act, which covers minimum wage and maximum hours in the workplace.
Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the Court, said the issue of pay for walking time was controlled by the Court’s 1956 decision in Steiner v. Mitchell. “The locker rooms where the special safety gear is donned and doffed are the relevant ‘place of performance’ of the principal activity that the employee was employed to perform,” within the meaning of federal law. “Walking to that place before starting work is excluded [from federal pay law coverage, but the statutory text does not exclude walking from that place to another area within the plant immediately after the workday has commenced.”
However, for the period that the Court called “pre-doffing waiting time,” the decision found that not covered by wage and hour law. This time, Stevens wrote, elapses before the principal activity of donning integral and indispensable gear.
In the second of two decisions Tuesday, the Court unanimously limited the government’s liability for lawsuits for failure to carry out duties required by federal law — in this case, safety and health inspections. Reversing the Ninth Circuit, the Court ruled that the U.S. government surrenders its sovereign immunity to being sued only in situations where local law would make a private person legally liable for wrongdoing. The Court said it was reversing “a line of Ninth Circuit precedent permitting courts in certain circumstances to base a waiver [of federal immunity] simply upon a finding that local law would make a ‘state or municipal entity’ liable. The decision came in the case of U.S. v. Olson (04-759).
(Disclosure: the law firm of Goldstein & Howe was involved in the IBP and Tum cases. The author of this post operates independently of the law practice.)
