The Fair Labor Standards Act requires employers to pay minimum wages and overtime wages based on time worked by covered employees. Oftentimes, an employee has to spend time waiting to put equipment, walking to a worksite, or doing other preshift tasks necessary to perform her job. Is the employee entitled to compensation under the FLSA for that time? Trial courts routinely address various iterations of this question. In IBP, Inc. v. Alvarez, 546 U.S. 21 (2005), the Supreme Court answered one of them. It held that the FLSA requires employers to pay employees for time spent walking to and from stations that distributed employer-mandated safety equipment.
Facts
Alvarez involved two separate but similar cases. Employees of IBP filed suit under the FLSA seeking compensation for time they spent putting on and taking off (“donning and doffing”) required protective gear and walking between the locker rooms and the production floor of IBP’s meat processing facility. The trial court decided these activities were compensable. The Ninth Circuit affirmed. IBP appealed.
In the companion case, employees of Barber Foods sought compensation under the FLSA for time they spent donning and doffing required protective gear at Barber’s poultry processing plant, as well as time they spent walking and waiting associated with picking up and returning the gear. The trial court found in favor of Barber on the walking and waiting claims, finding those activities were not compensable. The First Circuit affirmed, finding that the walking and waiting times were preliminary and postliminary activities excluded from FLSA coverage by §§4(a)(1) and (2) of the Portal-to-Portal Act of 1947. The employees appealed.
The U.S. Supreme Court consolidated the cases to address the question of whether the FLSA requires employers to pay employees for time spent walking to and from stations that distributed required safety equipment.
Legal Background
In Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co., 328 U.S. 680, 691–692 (1946), the Supreme Court held that a “workweek” under the FLSA included the time employees spent walking from time clocks near a factory entrance to their workstations. In response to that decision, Congress passed the Portal-to-Portal Act. The Portal-to-Portal Act excepted from FLSA coverage walking on the employer’s premises to and from the location of the employee’s “principal activity or activities,” §4(a)(1), and activities that are “preliminary or postliminary” to “said principal activity or activities,” §4(a)(2).
The Department of Labor subsequently issued regulations which interpreted the Portal-to-Portal Act as not affecting the computation of hours within a “workday,” 29 CFR §790.6(a), which includes “the period between the commencement and completion” of the “principal activity or activities,” §790.6(b).
In a subsequent Supreme Court decision, Steiner v. Mitchell, 350 U.S. 247, 256 (1956), the Court explained that the “term ‘principal activity or activities’ … embraces all activities which are ‘an integral and indispensable part of the principal activities,’ ” including the donning and doffing of specialized protective gear “before or after the regular work shift, on or off the production line.”
The Court’s Decision
In the 2005 Alvarez decision, the Court held that an employee putting on employer-required safety equipment qualified as a “principal activity” under the FLSA. The continuous “workday” for purposes of calculating compensable time began when employees started that activity. Therefore, compensable time included the subsequent time employees spent walking to and from the worksite after donning their protective gear, and time spent waiting to doff the gear. The Court further held that the previous time spent waiting to put on the safety equipment, however, was not included in the workday, and not compensable time, because it was a “preliminary” activity under the Portal-to-Portal Act. 546 U.S. at 28-38.
Time spent walking to and from the worksite after donning and before doffing protective gear is compensable time
First, the Alvarez held that the time the IBP employees spent walking after changing into protective gear from the locker room to the production floor was compensable under the FLSA. 546 U.S. at 33-37.
The Court explained that Section 4(a)(1) of the Portal-to-Portal Act text does not exclude this time from the FLSA. IBP had argued that, because donning is not the “principal activity” that starts the workday, walking occurring immediately after donning and immediately before doffing is not compensable. That argument, the Court pointed out, was foreclosed by its decision in Steiner, which clarified that §4 does not remove activities that are “integral and indispensable” to “principal activities” from FLSA coverage because those activities are themselves “principal activities.” 350 U. S. at 253. The Court went on to explain that that these identical terms cannot mean different things within the same law (§4(a)(2) and in §4(a)(1)). According to the normal rules of statutory interpretation, identical words used in different parts of the same statute are generally presumed to have the same meaning. Further, with respect to §4(a)(2)’s reference to “said principal activity or activities,” “said” is an explicit reference to the use of the identical term in §4(a)(1). Alvarez, 546 U.S. at 33-35.
The Court also rejected IBP’s argument that Congress’s repudiation of the Anderson decision (by passing the Portal-to-Portal Act) reflected a legislative purpose to exclude the walking time at issue from the FLSA. The Court found this argument unpersuasive because it observed the time at issue in Alvarez, which occurred after the workday begins (by donning) and before it ends (by doffing), was more comparable to time spent walking between two different positions on an assembly line than to the walking in Anderson, which occurred before the workday began. Id. at 34-35.
The Court also pointed out the DOL regulations supported the compensable nature of the IBP employees’ walking time. For example, 29 CFR §790.6 did not strictly define the workday’s limits as the period from “whistle to whistle.” And 29 CFR §790.7(g), n. 49, which provides that postdonning walking time is not “necessarily” excluded from §4(a)(1) of the Portal-to-Portal Act, does not mean that such time is always excluded. Therefore, the Court determined those regulations could not overcome clear statements elsewhere in the regulations that supported the compensable nature of postdonning walking time. 546 U.S. at 35-37.
Time spent waiting to doff is compensable time
With respect to the Barber Foods employees, the Court similarly held that because donning and doffing gear that is “integral and indispensable” to employees’ work is a “principal activity” under the FLSA, the continuous workday rule required that the time the Barber Foods employees spent walking to and from the production floor after donning and before doffing, as well as the time spent waiting to doff at the end of the day, are not affected by the Portal-to-Portal Act. Therefore, this time was compensable under the FLSA. 546 U.S. at 37-39.
Time spent waiting to don is not compensable time
Finally, however, the Court held that time spent waiting to don protective gear before work is not compensable time. The Court’s reasoned that §4(a)(2) of the Portal-to-Portal Act excluded from the FLSA the time employees spend waiting to don the first piece of gear that marks the beginning of the continuous workday. The Court determined that this qualifies as a “preliminary” activity because it was “two steps removed” from the productive activity on the assembly line. While certain preshift activities were necessary for employees to engage in their principal activities, the Court found that this does not mean that those preshift activities are “integral and indispensable” to a “principal activity” under Steiner. The Court expressed a concern that it could not conclude that Barber employees predonning waiting time was a compensable “principle activity” without also reaching the necessary (but untenable) conclusion that the walking time in Anderson would also be a “principal activity” unaffected by the Portal-to-Portal Act. The Court observed that 29 CFR §790.7(h) (differentiating between being “engaged to wait,” which is compensable, and “wait[ing] to be engaged, which is not compensable) did not support a finding that time spent waiting to don protective gear was compensable. 546 U.S. at 39-42.
Analysis
In short, Alvarez held that an employee putting on employer-required safety equipment qualified as a “principal activity” under the FLSA. The continuous “workday” for purposes of calculating compensable time began when employees started that activity.
This determination, that the workday begins with donning, has two important implications. First, FLSA compensable time included the subsequent time employees spent walking to and from the worksite after donning their protective gear, and time waiting to doff their gear. Second, however, the previous time employees spent waiting to don the protective equipment was not included in the workday, and not compensable time, because it was a “preliminary” activity under the Portal-to-Portal Act.
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