Amazon – WHEN THE ABUSER GOES TO WORK

Amazon’s Xmas Gift From U.S. Supreme Court

The nation’s high court ruled unanimously this week that Amazon.com warehouse workers aren’t entitled to pay for the half hour they spend being screened for theft at the end of their work shifts.

It’s another blow against low-wage workers by the most pro-business, anti-employee U.S. Supreme Court in recent history.

The opinion, authored by Justice Clarence Thomas, held that the time the workers spent waiting to be screened isn’t an integral and indispensable part of their jobs. Thomas writes the workers were hired to take products off the shelves and package them for shipment to Amazon’s customers, not to go through security screenings. The Court ruled the screenings “are not an intrinsic element of retrieving products from warehouse shelves or packaging them for shipment.”

The ruling, in the case of Integrity Staffing Solutions, Inc. v. Busk, allows the company to force workers to stand in line without pay at the end of each shift to go through the humiliating process of emptying their pockets and walking through metal detectors. And the company has no incentive to reduce the wait-time by adding staff to expedite the process. Integrity Staffing Solutions operates two warehouses in Las Vegas and Fernley, NV, that serve as storage and order-filling facilities for the online retail giant Amazon.com.

Two of Integrity’s hourly workers sued the company after it began requiring all workers to go through screening before they left the premises, a policy designed to deter theft of goods. The workers alleged they could spend 20 to 25 minutes in unpaid time waiting to leave their shifts because there weren’t enough screeners.

The high court’s ruling reversed a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which held that Integrity must pay overtime for the screening process because the after-work review was a job requirement that was for the company’s benefit.

The Court ruled that the U.S. Congress passed the Portal-to-Portal Act of 1947 to exempt employers from liability under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 for claims based on “activities which are preliminary to or postliminary to” the performance of the principal activities that an employee is employed to perform. “The security screenings at issue are noncompensable postliminary activities,” ruled the Court.

Thomas notes in his opinion that the U.S. Solicitor General and the U.S. Department of Labor agreed with the Court that the screenings were “noncompensable postliminary activities.”

Of course, Congress could act in response to the Court’s decision and require employers to pay workers for time they are required to spend at work. Hah!

Meanwhile, around 500 workers at two of German’s Amazon warehouses went on strike Monday morning to protest their pay and working conditions. Union supporters believe the company is misclassifying workers in order to underpay them, and the strikers hope to force the company to raise its starting pay from the current level of nearly $12 an hour. When the Communication Workers of America tried to unionize 400 workers in 2000, Amazon closed the call center they were targeting.

Bah Humbug.

Amazon’s Free Lunch

A recent federal court decision offers a glimpse into the miserly working conditions of hourly workers at two national distribution centers for Amazon.com in Nevada.

Two workers, Jesse Busk and Laurie Castro, filed a class action lawsuit in 2010 arguing that they should be paid for the 25 minutes it takes them to depart the Amazon distribution warehouse at the end of their shift. They said workers must stand in line for a security clearance that requires them to remove their wallets, keys and belts and walk through a metal detector.

Busk and Castro are former employees of Integrity Staffing Solutions, Inc., which provides warehouse space and staffing to Amazon.com in Fernley and Las Vegas.

The workers also argued they should be paid for their 30-minute lunch break because they had to pass through a security clearance when they left the factory floor and it took ten minutes to get to and from the cafeteria. Also, they said, supervisors frequently “reminded” them during the lunch period to “finish their meal period quickly so that they would clock back in on time.”

An appeals court panel ruled on April 12 that the Fair Labor Standard Act (FLSA) requires workers to be compensated for the time spent undergoing the security clearance at the end of their shift but does not require compensation for time deducted from their 30-minute lunch break.

In Busk, et al v. Integrity Staffing Solution ,a three-judge panel for U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said the time the spent on the security clearance at the end of the day was necessary to employees’ primary work as warehouse employees filling orders placed through Amazon.com. Also, the panel wrote, “Integrity allegedly requires the screening to prevent employee theft, a concern that stems from the nature of the employees’ work (specifically, their access to merchandise).”

However, the appeals court panel ruled the workers’ lunch-break time was not compensable under the FLSA because it was not integral and indispensable to the workers’ principal activity of filling orders placed through Amazon.com.

The panel contended that any time spent by workers going through the security clearance during the lunch break was “de minimus” or too inconsequential to require compensation. The panel noted that employees claimed they were required to pass through the security check only on their way to the cafeteria and “not on the return trip. The relatively minimal time expended on the clearance in this context differs from the 25-minute delay alleged for employees passing through security at day’s end.”

Finally, the panel writes, “That supervisors may have ‘interrupted’ Busk and Castro … does not make their lunch periods compensable absent any claim that they performed a work duty.”

While throwing out the federal FLSA claim, the appellate panel did say the workers’ could raise a state law claim they asserted in the appeal with respect to their shortened lunch period. The plaintiffs argued that workers have greater protection under a Nevada law that requires that an employer provide a half-hour meal break if it employs a worker for a continuous eight-hour period.

The panel reversed a lower court’s pre-trial dismissal of the case and remanded the case back to the district court for further consideration.

The panel noted that Busk and Castro did not claim the walk to and from the cafeteria deprived them of adequate time to eat lunch. “We express no view on whether such a claim is cognizable under FLSA, nor on whether the plaintiffs could amend their complaint to state a valid claim under FLSA. We leave that to the district court’s consideration on remand,” the panel states

Link Between Bullying & Discrimination

One of the most common types of lawsuits facing American employers is a discrimination lawsuit.

Workplace bullying and discrimination are closely intertwined and one might even say that bullying precipitates many discrimination lawsuits

Discrimination involves unfair treatment of an individual or group of individuals because of a distinguishing characteristic that is protected under state or federal law, such as sex, race, national origin, disability, religion, etc. But it also frequently also involves workplace bullying, which is the systematic and repeated harassment of an employee over a period of time.. One employee – often a supervisor – attempts to exercise improper power and control over another, often a subordinate.

Even people who despise women or minorities probably would tolerate them if they silently accept whatever abuse the bully chooses to inflict upon them, never outshine or demonstrate competence that threatens the bully and act with complete subservience at all times. Of course, that doesn’t always happens. Targets of discrimination often complain and demand to be treated with fairness. That’s when the workplace bullying begins in earnest. A bully cannot tolerate a target who refuses to aknowledge the bully’s “right” to exercise complete power and control over the target.

Employers never win when they are sued by workers. Among other things, employers have to spend money to defend themselves. It is estimated that it costs an employer $100,000 to defend even the weakest and least meritorious lawsuit, nevermind a strong case that may ultimately result in a settlement or a judgment for the plaintiff.

Last March, a physician’s assistant at a Sacramento hospital won a jury award of $168 million after alleging she was harassed by cardiac surgeons at the hospital. She filed 18 complaints with the Human Resources Department, which not only ignored her complaints but actually fired her! She speculates the hospital’s failure to address her complaints was because the cardiac surgeons are the highest revenue producers in the hospital. The jury award included $128 million in punitive damages.

Many industrialized countries have adopted health and safety laws and other kinds of legislation to protect workers from bullying and harassment, and to require employers to provide all employees with a workplace free from bullying and psychological harassment. But America has resisted efforts to protect workers here from bullying for more than a decade. Why?

Some unscrupulous employers use bullying strategically to get rid of good employees and to avoid legal obligations, such as paying worker’s compensation or unemployment benefits. Some unscrupulous employers use bullying to thwart unions and drive out workers who demand their rights under the law. In some cases, the worker actually has a technical right under some law to sue the employer but the reality is that few workers today can afford the legal process. And it’s biased in favor of employers anyway.

Finally, it is not inconceivable that there’s a lot of ignorance out there about how much workplace bullying costs American employers – literally billions of dollars a year- in unnecessary turnover, lost work and needless litigation.

The unscrupulous employers are probably a small minority of American employers. Most employers want to follow the law and be good citizens.

There is an easy and relatively inexpensive way for good employers to mimize the risk of a potentially catastrophic discrmination lawsuit . They should adopt and rigorously enforce a general anti-harassment anti-bullying policy that makes it clear that bullying will not be tolerated by anyone in the organization, including cardiac surgeons and the Chief Executive Officer. By the way, that’s also the right thing to do. Doesn’t every employee deserve to be treated with dignity and respect?

Those who are interested in reading more about this topic should read my new book, Surviving Bullies, Queen Bees & Psychopaths in the Workplace.