The Supreme Court is looking at a case that will decide whether employees at places like the Amazon warehouses have to be paid for the time they are screened by security, each day when they leave work. This is a process that currently takes 25 minutes. At one point, after Amazon lost a lower court case, they hired more screeners and trimmed the process to five minutes. But, hiring employees costs money and in these difficult times the last thing our job creators need to do is hire more people!
I thought this had been decided years ago. I know that employers have always been looking to squeeze as much work out of employees as possible without pay. But, it's the 21st century in what is often referred to as THE GREATEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD and Walmart- it's largest employer, still forces employees to work off the clock. It saves them money. They roll back prices to save you money and they roll back employment practices to the early 20th century because that makes them money. They get caught for it, pay a fine and move on in life only to do it again. Getting caught is part of doing crime. It's part of doing business. They, and other corporations would rather cut the middleman that the courts are and just police themselves.
What is afoot here, what the Supreme's will be deciding, is whether employers can legitimately screw employees like this. If so, it's another huge chunk out of workers rights. It's wage theft.
Workers in a warehouse like Amazon may well be taking work home with them. Certainly not all but, maybe four or five? You gotta check. I get that. If it's part of the job, it's part of the job and people need to be paid for their time. If it's not part of the job, well then it's optional. "Would you like to stay late and be searched for free? No? OK, see you tomorrow!"
I've been subject to such searches when I've painted at warehouses. Some were damn near comical. We did a job at some company that did some tech stuff I never understood that had lost $1 million in employee theft the year before and they insisted that our work and lunch boxes be checked when we left at the end of our day. OK. The thing was, we were allowed unchecked access in and out of the same building to our trucks all day. There was a security guard stationed at our designated door but he didn't check anything whether we went out for a tool or a smoke. We had free run of the place- until quittin' time. All the guards were like this but the very friendly,American-Indian guy we most often dealt with, confided that they hadn't even been trained what to look for. They just made a perfunctory look and let us through.
Security guards are often a mixed bag. Some may have been concentration camp guards in a previous life. They took their jobs perhaps too seriously. One day, an entire job was shut down by the general contractor because the new security guard insisted that every visitor (worker) leave their drivers license with her the entire time they were on site. She wouldn't budge. So, until she heard different from her superiors, no one could work. That lasted a day. The GC wanted to let the tenant know that, until they got the Use and Occupancy permit, it was his building. That actually is the way that works. His guys got to go home with pay but this Ferrerman had to go to another job as I worked for someone else. But, I got paid for the whole damn day, including all the unnecessary running around!
We had another one on a job who tried to give parking tickets to the trades who had parked in handicap spaces. Mind you, whatever the business was it was not open to the public yet and security guard parking tickets aren't even good for rolling joints. It was the thought that counted though the deed itself had not.
To some degree this happened on every job whether there was preexisting security or new security. The new ones were befuddling because we were used to having the run of a building for months until 'security' came along. Most were easy enough to work with but some, if they had been at Auschwitz, there might still be people enslaved there by guards...just following orders...
I had one boss (currently under several indictments for bank fraud and other crimes) who was terrified that we were stealing from him because we filled out our own time sheets. There's a reason we in construction do this. All of our work is spread about town and even out of town where time clocks are unavailable. It's kinda the honor system and it's not as sorta-kinda accurate as a time clock and I promise you that construction companies want it this way because my time sheet is subject to rewrites the second it leaves my hand. I put down a quite accurate representation of my day-to-day work and my boss would then change it to reflect how the company wanted my time billed to various clients. There were jobs I never saw that clients were billed for my time and considerable talents. Anyway, the terrified now-indicted boss insisted that we begin and end each day at the time clock in the office. This meant that our time spent travelling from the office to the job was accounted for and paid for as was our leaving the job early to travel to punch out. In other words, thinking we were screwing him out of time, he fucked himself out of as much as an hour each day, five days a week, fifty two weeks a year....
A company has to pay travel time if they insist on you coming to the shop each day before going to the job site. It's a cost of doing business. What the companies are trying to do now in these corporate times is to legalize wage theft. It saves them money. Add up the nearly three dollars per hour that the Obama administration wants to raise the minimum. I guarantee every employer who pays minimum has and they're not happy about it. Amazon has done the math on how much they can save by not paying employees to be searched and it's enough to make a Federal case out of it.
So, yes, employee theft is a huge deal. But, not everybody does it. If your only security measure is checking every employee when they leave, every day, then pay people for the time it takes. It's part of the job. Considering that so many people are having an issue with there even being a minimum wage, I have to wonder how long before we just quit messing around with the pretense of working for a living and realize that we are really living for work, at the will of others?
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