The recent Supreme
Court decision that said A__z_n did not need to compensate workers for time
spent in security check lines at the end of their shifts sounded strange to me.
The employer's argument was (1) that the wait is rarely as long as 30 minutes, usually
only a couple of minutes, and (2) if workers had to be compensated, it
would cost this employer and others across the country millions of
dollars. Huh? Wait a minute! Which is it?
If compensating workers for time spent in line would be that costly, the workers must be
spending a lot of time in those lines. Or, if the wait is really so short, how
could compensation be such a costly burden to the employer?
Wouldn't you think that counting time spent in security check lines as work time would motivate the employer to keep
the wait short, even when, as was the case in the original lawsuit, the
employer outsourced the security check to another company?
The application of
“portal to portal” in this case sounds fishy, too. The employees obviously have
not yet left their workplace, because it is precisely the purpose of the
security check to sniff out attempted thefts before workers leave. And if they were not
still at work, how could the employer demand that they submit to a security
check?
5 comments:
A lawyer friend explains this to me, and it's pretty interesting:
"Here's the complete decision. Looks to me like a pretty straightforward statutory construction argument that's hard to dispute. The decision was 9-0 (despite being written by Thomas) and based on the fact that Congress amended the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act in the "Portal-to-Portal Act" to expressly render time spent preliminary to and postliminary to an employee's performing the principal activities of the employee's job not compensable under the FLSA. Workers have Congress to thank for this, not the Court's reasoning. The inconsistent logic employed by the employer in this case is standard procedure in legal arguments. The idea is to employ arguments "in the alternative" to your principal argument in case the court doesn't buy your primary argument. Such alternative arguments need not be consistent with the primary argument. The goal is to win and to use whatever argument you think will be persuasive to the Court. It's called result-oriented reasoning, legal reasoning or sophistry."
He sends a link, too.
http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/13-433_5h26.pdf
Whoever would have imagined that an inconsistent argument would be more persuasive than a consistent argument? Downright frightening!
"It's called result-oriented reasoning, legal reasoning or sophistry." In other words,
law and justice are not the same.
BB, hey! How have you been?
I'm not so naive as to think law = justice, but I am, I confess, optimistic enough to hope that American law will deliver or serve justice. What, do you suppose, are the odds in favor of a just result result in any given case?
Law students learn on day one that law and justice are two quite different, though hopefully related, things. As one law professor put it, "law is a kind of justice," though frequently a very unsatisfactory form of justice.
I think -- hope! -- we all know that there can be bad laws and that even good laws can be badly enforced. Clearly I need to ponder this particular decision further, because it still sticks in my craw. (Whatever a craw is.)
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