By Lisa Sorenen

In a unanimous opinion in Integrity Staffing Solutions v. Busk the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) does not require hourly employees to be paid for the time they spend waiting to undergo and undergoing security screenings.

State government employees who work in courthouses, correctional institutions, and warehouses routinely go through security screening  at the beginning or end of the workday, or both.   

Jesse Busk and Laurie Castro worked at warehouses filling Amazon.com orders. They claimed they should have been paid for the time they spent waiting and going through security screenings to prevent theft at the end of each shift.

Under the FLSA, employers only have to pay “non-exempt” employees for preliminary and postliminary activities that are “integral and indispensable” to a principal activity. According to the court, an activity is “integral and indispensable” to a principal activity “if it is an intrinsic element of those activities and one with which the employee cannot dispense if he is to perform his principal activities.”

The court concluded that security screenings were not intrinsic to retrieving and packing products and that Integrity Staffing Solutions could have eliminated the screenings altogether without impairing employees’ ability to complete their work.

The SLLC’s amicus brief made similar arguments to those the court adopted.

This case is a significant victory for states that will now not be faced with higher payroll costs for employee security screenings or a mandate to reduce screenings to a de minimis amount.  

Lisa Soronen is the executive director of the State and Local Legal Center and writes frequently for the NCSL blog about the U.S. Supreme Court.