SALEM, Ore. (Legal Newsline) - Amazon employees can’t sue under Oregon labor laws for wages they say they earned while going through security screening, the state’s high court ruled, because state laws mirror federal regulations that exclude such incidental activities.
An employee at Amazon’s Troutdale warehouse sued on behalf of herself and other workers to recover wages for time they spent between clocking out and passing through a security check for stolen goods. The warehouse had five “express lanes,” where employees simply walked through a metal detector, but workers who brought in metal items or bags were subjected to slightly longer screening including putting their bag on a belt for x-ray examination.
Amazon removed the case to federal court, where it argued the plaintiffs’ claims were barred by the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2014 decision Integrity Staffing v. Busk, which held security screenings at an Amazon warehouse weren’t considered compensable time under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act. Amazon further argued Oregon’s labor laws tracked the federal law.
The Ninth Circuit certified the question back to the Oregon Supreme Court, which ruled for Amazon in a Dec. 15 opinion.
Congress passed the FLSA in 1938 but courts were quickly required to define what constituted “work” and time that should be compensated. The U.S. Supreme Court decided that coal miners must be paid for time they spent traveling underground in 1944 and in 1946 the court ruled that workers must be paid for all time they were required to be on the employer’s premises.
The next year, Congress passed the Portal-to-Portal Act of 1947, exempting employers from time spent walking to the place where work is done and “preliminary or postliminary” activities unless they were already paid according to “a custom or practice” in that workplace. The Supreme Court further refined “preliminary or postliminary” activities to exclude things that are “integral and indispensable” to the job, such as showing after being exposed to caustic chemicals.
In Integrity Staffing, the court held security screenings did not meet that test. Oregon legislators passed their own labor law to cover a small number of employees who weren’t covered by the FLSA, the court found. The state later raised its minimum wage above federal levels, but included a definition of “work time” that tracked the Supreme Court’s interpretation of “integral and indispensable” activities subject to the law, the court found.
“Accordingly, we conclude that the Oregon legislature did not intend to adopt a broad definition of compensable time above and beyond the existing federal understanding and that Oregon’s definition of `work time’ aligns with federal law,” the Oregon Supreme Court concluded.
Now that the law is clear, the court went on, plaintiffs could petition the legislature to depart from federal standards and broaden the definition of compensable time.