The U.S. Supreme Court ruling on time spent in Amazon warehouse security lines reversed an appeals-court victory for temporary workers who said they were owed wages for waiting to leave through security stations. The case brought the uncounted minutes at the end of a warehouse shift into a legal dispute over paid work time, against the backdrop of Amazon’s antitheft screening procedures.

Causes and Background

At Amazon’s Fernley facility, workers clocked out at the end of their shifts and then exited through a station staffed by metal detectors and security guards. The screening was part of the company’s antitheft strategy; for workers, it also meant that the shift’s final minutes could be spent waiting after they had clocked out.

Reno attorney Mark Thierman represented temporary workers from Amazon’s Fernley and Las Vegas warehouses. Their claim was that the time spent waiting in the security lines—up to thirty minutes a day—should have been paid. The dispute concerned not only the existence of the screenings, but whether workers’ time in those lines counted as compensable time.

The Appellate Reversal

In 2013, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in the workers’ favor. The ruling was overturned the following year by the U.S. Supreme Court. The book records this sequence without detailing the Supreme Court’s reasoning, so the event’s central documented turn is the reversal of the workers’ appeals-court success.

The ruling appears in the account of Linda May’s warehouse experience, where exertion and tedium shaped the long overnight shift. Her description places the exit screening at the end of a workday that lasted until a couple of hours before sunrise. The wage claim, however, belonged to a group of temporary workers from Fernley and Las Vegas; the account does not identify Linda as one of the claimants.

Consequences and Significance

The dispute made visible a boundary between clocked work and the security process workers faced as they left the warehouse. The workers’ claim put a specific measure on that boundary: as much as thirty minutes of waiting per day. The Supreme Court’s reversal changed the legal outcome after the appeals court had sided with them, though the account does not state any further consequences for the workers or describe the court’s legal test.

Placed beside the routine of clocking out and filing past metal detectors, the case shows how a small, repeated interval could become a question of wages and workplace control. Its significance in the narrative is not presented through a courtroom scene, but through its contrast with the ordinary end of the shift: workers left the building, while the question of whether their waiting time counted as work went on to the highest court.