Wage rule for time spent waiting for warehouse security screening

The wage rule for time spent waiting for warehouse security screening became a point of dispute over whether temporary warehouse workers should be paid for time spent passing through security after a shift. Workers said the screening lines could keep them waiting for as long as thirty minutes a day; although an appeals court initially ruled in their favor, the U.S. Supreme Court later reversed that decision, leaving the dispute’s central question visible in the gap between work ending and workers being allowed to leave.

The screening process

At Amazon’s Fernley warehouse, employees clocked out at the end of their shifts and then exited through a station staffed by security guards and equipped with metal detectors. The company used the screening as part of its antitheft strategy. Because the checks took place after clocking out, workers seeking back wages argued that the time spent waiting in line should nevertheless count as compensable work time.

The claimed waiting could add up to thirty minutes a day. The dispute was therefore not about time spent scanning or shelving products, but about the minutes workers remained inside the workplace after their recorded shift had ended, waiting to pass through the security station.

The back-wage claim and court decisions

Reno attorney Mark Thierman represented a group of temporary workers from Amazon’s Fernley and Las Vegas warehouses who claimed they were owed back wages for time spent waiting at the security stations. In 2013, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in the workers’ favor. The following year, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned that decision.

The account establishes this sequence of rulings but does not detail the courts’ legal reasoning or specify a general test for when security screening time must be paid. The reversal is consequential, but it should not be read here as evidence of a broader rule beyond the outcome described in the case.

Place in warehouse labor conditions

The security-line dispute arose in a workplace organized around close monitoring and high-throughput tasks. Stowers used handheld scanners to register products and bins, while Amazon tracked productivity in real time; at the end of the shift, the same employees still had to pass through the security station before leaving. The wage claim thus concerned a boundary between recorded work and employer-controlled exit procedures, rather than the production tasks themselves.

The book places the case alongside other accounts of demanding warehouse labor, including workers’ reports of pressure to meet production targets and the physical demands of walking and handling merchandise. Within that broader picture, waiting time becomes a distinct labor issue: the shift could be over on the time clock while workers were still required to remain in line inside the facility.