As a teenager, I worked running boardwalk games for a very well known theme park. I don't want to say the name, but let's just say it was one with many flags.
Every day the workflow was as follows:
1. Sign-in in the employee entrance office.
2. Get your cash bag from costumes.
3. Pick up $200 worth of singles from the cash office for making change which both you and the teller would count out.
4. Go through a security check.
5. Walkthrough the park from the employee entrance to where your game was (often the other side of the park).
The whole thing took 20 minutes and we would signed-in to start being paid at the next 15 minute interval from when we arrived at our game.
When we checked out, we did the whole process in reverse but would be signed-out for the previous 15 minute interval when we left our game area.
All in all, we were losing 40-68 minutes of wages per day. Worse if there were long lines in the office or costumes or the cash office.
Of course, we were also only paid $6.15 an hour and had to pay union dues out of that, so in total, it didn't add up to much...
Meanwhile, at the Magic Kingdom down in Florida, we would clock in after taking the bus from the employee lot to the main park employee entrance and then get our uniform, get changed, walk to the attraction, etc.
On leaving, we would leave our attraction 20 minutes prior to the end of our shift, walk back, get changed, etc, and then clock out.
Unions matter. I'm shocked that any union would allow off the clock work like that.
> ... signed-in to start being paid at the next 15 minute interval from when we arrived at our game.
> ... signed-out for the previous 15 minute interval when we left our game area.
This is actually the most surprising thing to me in your story. Usually the laws about rounding in time keeping state that the rounding must go the same direction. So if they round to the next interval on start, they should also be rounding to the next interval on end.
The reason why this is the most surprising part to me, is because that's a pretty cut-and-dry labor violation. Compared to the rest that would have to go through a court case like the one in TFA.
As a teenager, I worked at a Kmart. It didn't take too long to be "promoted" to cashier. They never let anyone near the money room without already being on the clock.
You got your till loaded with cash, counted it out, and walked to your register. All on the clock. When done, you took your till back, counted it out, and handed it back in. All on the clock.
I'm only writing this as a counter example - not every place was awful about it.
That's a lot.. an hour a day is 1/8th of your pay. If this was year around, that would be (260 work days) $1600.. out of $12800/year total gross pay for full time.
You say it's not a lot, but that's only because the job doesn't pay a lot and (I assume) it was short term.
Huh. I did the exact same job for a competing park, owned by a fair, and we got paid from when we showed up to the main office to when we ended at the main office.
The only unpaid time was the walk to/from the very back of the parking lot to the main office.
I worked at Best Buy during college, and if you closed you'd have to wait for a manager to unlock the door for you and check your stuff.
If I had to wait more than a minute or so, I'd fill out a time correction for the time I was spent locked in the building. Anytime someone said anything about it, I said if I'm stuck in the building I'm under the company's control, so I should be paid. Eventually managers just started getting there faster when I paged them.
A while later Best Buy was sued for this and lost.
I worked for Best Buy (Geek Squad) as well, about 12 years ago. I had the same experience. Even if they were going to pay me for the time, it felt wrong that they told me I was not able to leave. At times you could be waiting for 15 minutes. It was my first job at 16 years of age, and I didn't have the care or confidence to correct the time punch. At my store they would have to approve time punch modifications, so it would have been obvious if you did that every night.
The one person who did get fired for stealing was simply grabbing laptops, removing them from their box, and casually walking out with them.
Reminds me of reading an article talking about how Walmart used to lock people in who worked the night shift like stocking shelfs. Seems like Walmart was doing this in the early 2000s, there's an article from 2004 in the New York Times. Didn't know that there was a similar thing at Best Buy, wonder what year that was.
I'm conflicted about the decision for a few reasons:
1. The "off-the-clock" mandates came from individual managers, not from Apple corporate so Apple corporate should have addressed that immediately. Unless that's been changed recently, this could have been nipped in the bud from the start.
2. The store policies do outline that personal bags must be inspected before employees leave the store but it doesn't mention anything about whether that needs to be done after they've clocked out. I used to work with/in an Apple Store and even we were required to do this but it was always done before we clocked out for the day. I know the article says that employees were required to clock out prior to the bag check but that was not my experience.
3. Retail employees should absolutely have been paid by those managers if they were mandating this and it should never have gone to court in the first place. The decision is right but I feel like most of the costs are going to go to lawyers and that rubs me the wrong way.
4. Policies also spelled this out before employees came into the stores. If I knew I wasn't getting paid for this, I feel like I'd be less inclined to bring a bag with me. Not sure if that's right but it feels like there should have been some pushback from employees to higher-level people. It sounds like an HR issue from the get-go.
It's quite bizarre, especially when you consider how inefficient Apple stores are to begin with. They're intended as much for marketing, brand awareness, and a display of gluttony via the impressive modern construction that invites parallels to their premium products and manufacturing quality, as they are for actually selling products. They have way more employees working than they'd need if they just had normal retail workflows with check-out counters (and are also more frustrating to navigate as a customer). They even include entire mini-auditoriums to put on free events, weird seminars and panels and even concerts that nobody asked for.
But making sure employees aren't paid while they wait to be able to leave is a critically important cost-saving measure and worth going to court over?
I posted a similar sentiment but you've highlighted the key point. It's (slightly) understandable that this was company policy as it was probably decided somewhere down the food chain.
But at the point it became a court case, red lights should have been flashing at the highest levels that this was the kind of thing that paints the company in a terrible light.
This is proper "don't be evil" territory. Don't be the bad guys, the cardboard cutout evil capitalists.
That was a U.S. Supreme Court ruling and not a California Supreme Court ruling. The plantiffs in that case were not all workers in CA and the case was based around the federal portal to portal law. This decision is based upon California state law and involves only employees in California for which state law would apply.
Judging by this quote, there’s a good chance SCOTUS overturns a ruling on this topic by the 9th circuit a second time.
> Justice Thomas disagreed, saying the appeals court had “erred by focusing on whether an employer required a particular activity.” The right test, he said, was whether the activity “is tied to the productive work that the employee is employed to perform.”
Maybe the 9th will overturn en blanc before it reaches SCOTUS.
Always amazing to see how things are decided by tiny reading of the English language. The law states…
Hours worked’ means the time during which an employee is subject to the control of an employer, and includes all the time the employee is suffered or permitted to work, whether or not required to do so
The lower court read that as "hours worked is the time under employer control where the employee can work whether they do it or not". The supremes cut that into two statements at the ", and" and made "subject to the control of the employer" stand alone in addition to when they could be made to work.
By definition the supremes are correct, but the judges that ruled the other way are also very experienced judges.
Also important… Apple (probably accidentally) forfeited the "de minimis" argument which says employees don't have to be paid for small, incidental periods of time off the clock. I was expecting this case to be a declaration on reasonable "de minimis" requirements. Instead we got a sentence diagramming exercise.
> The lower court read that as "hours worked is the time under employee control where the employee can work whether they do it or not". The supremes cut that into two statements at the ", and" and made "subject to the control of the employer" stand alone in addition to when they could be made to work.
(1) I think you meant "time under employer control"?
(2) Are you suggesting the lower court just ignored the "is suffered" part?
Yeah, the Amazon ruling never made sense to me. If your employer is restricting what you can do with your time (I.e. wait for a security screen before leaving work) then they need to pay you for that time.
It makes you wonder. Why isn't commute included? At the very least, shouldn't it be compensated 50% since it is activity done partly for work while not work itself?
This should have been an open-and-shut case, its unbelievable that it took years to re-affirm established norm that employees must be paid for their time, no matter what the firm decides to waste it on. So don't waste it.
Like many people, I worked retail. I never got angry at the security guy trying to let me out the door, but it was frustrating to wait 5 minutes here and there unpaid.
I agree that people should be paid for that time.. but I'm also curious where the line is drawn? I left the city to work on a small town because my commute 5 miles/day was 15-20 hours/week. I suppose you can argue many jobs pay well enough to cover that... But people also work retail in those areas.
An ideal solution would be to spread out the cities -- encourage more remote working (though not like we currently see)... But in lieu of that, where is the limit?
Is employee parking, which is a 5 minute walk to the back of the lot, covered? I had a friend that works at a car factory... If you don't drive that manufacturers car, you park in lot B, an extra minute or three away. Is that any different then being forced to stand at the for to leave a few minutes now and then? (It's not always 5-15 minutes, where this example is a constant).
Please accept this as a thought experiment... Not a criticism against better pay for retail. Everyone deserves the pursuit of happiness.
The limit, legally, is pretty cut and dry: commute time is not paid, anything on site is. If you have to wait in line for security, that's paid. If it takes 10 minutes to count out your till at the end of a cashier shift, that's paid. If you're sent to another location in the middle of the day, time getting there from your normal place of work is paid.
There are a small handful of edge cases that vary by state (e.g., if you have to change into a uniform when you get to work, that's considered on-the-clock in California, but not federally), but not many.
I think a line can be pretty cleanly drawn at "employer explicitly makes you do it in order to receive your paycheck". Like I wouldn't expect to be paid for my walk from the parking lot any more than be paid for the rest of my commute as that's not actually related to the job site, it's just a consequence of my transport method - what if I was catching the bus, or walking, or I lived in an apartment building across the road?
Conversely - mandatory security screening is something that the company makes all employees go through every day as part of their job - it's no different from any other job task.
Although having a separate further away carpark for people that don't eat and presumably pay for the company dog food is shitty for other reasons. Similar to some clothing stores forcing their minimum wage workers to buy and wear on brand clothing (yes this is a thing).
Many decades ago something similar happened with Best Buy employees and waiting to leave the building. My memory is fuzzy but I recall it having to do with some ruling by a government authority. Basically at night shift we could clock out but had to wait for the manager to let us out of the building. Sometimes were were waiting for 15 + minutes. All employees got back pay.
This is exactly what I thought about when I saw the headline. Amazon won that case and refused to pay for the security checks, does this ruling mean that they'll have to start paying too?
The fact that this awful nickle and diming of staff doesn't get vetoed by someone with a shred of awareness about PR, morale, good management and anything else beyond short-term balance sheet thinking speaks very ill of the company concerned.
It seems there was a similar case in 2014 about Amazon workers not getting paid for screening time. The US Supreme Court decided unanimously that Amazon did not have to pay them.
yes, that's actually what prompted me to submit the article, to stimulate discussion around that very question.
i haven't looked into each case in enough depth to have formulated an opinion yet, so i'm hoping we hn'ers come to some conclusions on that question together. =)
Awesome that’s great. It’d be interesting if you could some how extend that to commuting, so hourly workers taking trains in for service work are compensated for their times in transit.
Does it strike anyone else as absurd that a $2 trillion company has spent 5 years and untold millions arguing over whether it must compensate employees for the 15 minutes it takes for a company-mandated frisk?
In fact, Apple lawyers argued before the California Supreme Court that the time was not mandated since employees could waltz just opt to ‘not bring things with them’. How insane is that - the search is not technically ‘required’ since people don’t technically ‘need’ to bring things with them when they come to work? Who doesn’t need to bring a purse/phone/backpack to work?
The whole thing feels straight out of some alternative (dystopian?) future America like Infinite Jest.
I don't understand- how were they not being paid? If I had to show up for a 9 to 5 and there was 15 minutes of security screening, I'm showing up at 9 and getting paid for it, not showing up early. Am I OOTL on something here? Were they threatened with termination?
[+] [-] red_hare|5 years ago|reply
Every day the workflow was as follows:
The whole thing took 20 minutes and we would signed-in to start being paid at the next 15 minute interval from when we arrived at our game.When we checked out, we did the whole process in reverse but would be signed-out for the previous 15 minute interval when we left our game area.
All in all, we were losing 40-68 minutes of wages per day. Worse if there were long lines in the office or costumes or the cash office.
Of course, we were also only paid $6.15 an hour and had to pay union dues out of that, so in total, it didn't add up to much...
[+] [-] 98codes|5 years ago|reply
On leaving, we would leave our attraction 20 minutes prior to the end of our shift, walk back, get changed, etc, and then clock out.
Unions matter. I'm shocked that any union would allow off the clock work like that.
[+] [-] jdmichal|5 years ago|reply
> ... signed-out for the previous 15 minute interval when we left our game area.
This is actually the most surprising thing to me in your story. Usually the laws about rounding in time keeping state that the rounding must go the same direction. So if they round to the next interval on start, they should also be rounding to the next interval on end.
The reason why this is the most surprising part to me, is because that's a pretty cut-and-dry labor violation. Compared to the rest that would have to go through a court case like the one in TFA.
[+] [-] OldHand2018|5 years ago|reply
You got your till loaded with cash, counted it out, and walked to your register. All on the clock. When done, you took your till back, counted it out, and handed it back in. All on the clock.
I'm only writing this as a counter example - not every place was awful about it.
[+] [-] rgbrenner|5 years ago|reply
You say it's not a lot, but that's only because the job doesn't pay a lot and (I assume) it was short term.
[+] [-] spaced-out|5 years ago|reply
Not to you, but it definitely added up to a noticeable amount for your employer.
[+] [-] liability|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] burtonator|5 years ago|reply
I'm half joking but if your union dues were higher you would have been paid for that hour :-P
[+] [-] mikestew|5 years ago|reply
Rhetorical question, but what the hell was the union doing while this wage theft was going on?
[+] [-] Forbo|5 years ago|reply
https://i.redd.it/grnr8kxbl6zz.jpg
[+] [-] ROFISH|5 years ago|reply
The only unpaid time was the walk to/from the very back of the parking lot to the main office.
[+] [-] MiroF|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] learc83|5 years ago|reply
If I had to wait more than a minute or so, I'd fill out a time correction for the time I was spent locked in the building. Anytime someone said anything about it, I said if I'm stuck in the building I'm under the company's control, so I should be paid. Eventually managers just started getting there faster when I paged them.
A while later Best Buy was sued for this and lost.
[+] [-] dliff|5 years ago|reply
The one person who did get fired for stealing was simply grabbing laptops, removing them from their box, and casually walking out with them.
[+] [-] Keverw|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quesera|5 years ago|reply
Apple should do the right thing here, even if they are not legally obligated.
Pay retail employees for all work which is required of them. Do not dither over trivialities.
[+] [-] dkonofalski|5 years ago|reply
1. The "off-the-clock" mandates came from individual managers, not from Apple corporate so Apple corporate should have addressed that immediately. Unless that's been changed recently, this could have been nipped in the bud from the start.
2. The store policies do outline that personal bags must be inspected before employees leave the store but it doesn't mention anything about whether that needs to be done after they've clocked out. I used to work with/in an Apple Store and even we were required to do this but it was always done before we clocked out for the day. I know the article says that employees were required to clock out prior to the bag check but that was not my experience.
3. Retail employees should absolutely have been paid by those managers if they were mandating this and it should never have gone to court in the first place. The decision is right but I feel like most of the costs are going to go to lawyers and that rubs me the wrong way.
4. Policies also spelled this out before employees came into the stores. If I knew I wasn't getting paid for this, I feel like I'd be less inclined to bring a bag with me. Not sure if that's right but it feels like there should have been some pushback from employees to higher-level people. It sounds like an HR issue from the get-go.
[+] [-] cactus2093|5 years ago|reply
But making sure employees aren't paid while they wait to be able to leave is a critically important cost-saving measure and worth going to court over?
[+] [-] stale2002|5 years ago|reply
No matter how wrong it is (and, such as this case, where they lost in court), they will fight it to the very end.
[+] [-] andybak|5 years ago|reply
But at the point it became a court case, red lights should have been flashing at the highest levels that this was the kind of thing that paints the company in a terrible light.
This is proper "don't be evil" territory. Don't be the bad guys, the cardboard cutout evil capitalists.
Nobody on the board thought this was a bad look?
[+] [-] matz1|5 years ago|reply
For apple, employee are expenses, reducing expense and increasing profit is what a company should do.
[+] [-] skunkworker|5 years ago|reply
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/business/supreme-court-ru...
[+] [-] tssva|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gamblor956|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] granzymes|5 years ago|reply
> Justice Thomas disagreed, saying the appeals court had “erred by focusing on whether an employer required a particular activity.” The right test, he said, was whether the activity “is tied to the productive work that the employee is employed to perform.”
Maybe the 9th will overturn en blanc before it reaches SCOTUS.
[+] [-] jws|5 years ago|reply
Hours worked’ means the time during which an employee is subject to the control of an employer, and includes all the time the employee is suffered or permitted to work, whether or not required to do so
The lower court read that as "hours worked is the time under employer control where the employee can work whether they do it or not". The supremes cut that into two statements at the ", and" and made "subject to the control of the employer" stand alone in addition to when they could be made to work.
By definition the supremes are correct, but the judges that ruled the other way are also very experienced judges.
Also important… Apple (probably accidentally) forfeited the "de minimis" argument which says employees don't have to be paid for small, incidental periods of time off the clock. I was expecting this case to be a declaration on reasonable "de minimis" requirements. Instead we got a sentence diagramming exercise.
[+] [-] mehrdadn|5 years ago|reply
(1) I think you meant "time under employer control"?
(2) Are you suggesting the lower court just ignored the "is suffered" part?
[+] [-] falcolas|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] refurb|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] disown|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ClumsyPilot|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ldoughty|5 years ago|reply
I agree that people should be paid for that time.. but I'm also curious where the line is drawn? I left the city to work on a small town because my commute 5 miles/day was 15-20 hours/week. I suppose you can argue many jobs pay well enough to cover that... But people also work retail in those areas.
An ideal solution would be to spread out the cities -- encourage more remote working (though not like we currently see)... But in lieu of that, where is the limit?
Is employee parking, which is a 5 minute walk to the back of the lot, covered? I had a friend that works at a car factory... If you don't drive that manufacturers car, you park in lot B, an extra minute or three away. Is that any different then being forced to stand at the for to leave a few minutes now and then? (It's not always 5-15 minutes, where this example is a constant).
Please accept this as a thought experiment... Not a criticism against better pay for retail. Everyone deserves the pursuit of happiness.
[+] [-] GeneralMayhem|5 years ago|reply
There are a small handful of edge cases that vary by state (e.g., if you have to change into a uniform when you get to work, that's considered on-the-clock in California, but not federally), but not many.
[+] [-] p1necone|5 years ago|reply
Conversely - mandatory security screening is something that the company makes all employees go through every day as part of their job - it's no different from any other job task.
Although having a separate further away carpark for people that don't eat and presumably pay for the company dog food is shitty for other reasons. Similar to some clothing stores forcing their minimum wage workers to buy and wear on brand clothing (yes this is a thing).
[+] [-] bigtex|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wtn|5 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrity_Staffing_Solutions,_...
[+] [-] d3nj4l|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andybak|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|5 years ago|reply
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/business/supreme-court-ru...
How is this case different from the precedent established by the Amazon case?
Edit:
In the 2014 case, it was the 9th Circuit that was being overruled. I wonder if this decision is destined for the same fate.
[+] [-] gamblor956|5 years ago|reply
This case is about a CA state law, so Amazon case would not apply.
[+] [-] clairity|5 years ago|reply
i haven't looked into each case in enough depth to have formulated an opinion yet, so i'm hoping we hn'ers come to some conclusions on that question together. =)
[+] [-] ebg13|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] one2know|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spaetzleesser|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codyb|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blintz|5 years ago|reply
In fact, Apple lawyers argued before the California Supreme Court that the time was not mandated since employees could waltz just opt to ‘not bring things with them’. How insane is that - the search is not technically ‘required’ since people don’t technically ‘need’ to bring things with them when they come to work? Who doesn’t need to bring a purse/phone/backpack to work?
The whole thing feels straight out of some alternative (dystopian?) future America like Infinite Jest.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gumby|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heimatau|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deviation|5 years ago|reply