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8 

SANDIFER v. UNITED STATES STEEL CORP. 

Opinion of the Court 

  Petitioners’ proffered distinction, moreover, runs the risk
of  reducing  §203(o)  to  near  nothingness.    The  statutory 
compensation  requirement  to  which  §203(o)  provides  an 
exception embraces the changing of clothes only when that 
conduct constitutes “an integral and indispensable part of 
the  principal  activities  for  which  covered  workmen  are 
employed.”  Steiner, 350 U. S., at 256.  But protective gear 
is  the  only  clothing  that  is  integral  and  indispensable  to
the work of factory workers, butchers, longshoremen, and 
a  host  of  other  occupations.  Petitioners’  definition  of 
“clothes”  would  largely  limit  the  application  of  §203(o)  to
what  might  be  called  workers’  costumes,  worn  by  such
employees  as  waiters,  doormen,  and  train  conductors. 
Petitioners insist that their definition excludes only items 
with  some  specific  work-hazard-related  protective  func-
tion,  but  that  limitation  essentially  abandons  the  asser-
tion  that  clothes  are  for  decency  or  comfort,  leaving  no 
basis whatever for the distinction. 

Petitioners’ position is also incompatible with the histor-
ical  context  surrounding  §203(o)’s  passage,  since  it  flatly
contradicts  an  illustration  provided  by  the  Labor  Depart-
ment’s  1947  regulations  to  show  how  “changing  clothes” 
could be intimately related to a principal activity.  See 29 
CFR §790.7, and n. 49.  Those regulations cited the situa-
tion in which “an employee in a chemical plant . . . cannot 
perform  his  [job]  without  putting  on  certain  clothes”  and 
specified  that  “[s]uch  a  situation  may  exist  where  the
changing of clothes on the employer’s premises is required 
by  law,  by  rules  of  the  employer,  or  by  the  nature  of  the
work.”   12  Fed.  Reg.  7660,  and  n. 65;  29  CFR  §790.8(c),
and  n. 65.    And  petitioners’  position  contradicts  this 
Court’s only prior opinion purporting to interpret §203(o). 
Steiner,  announced  less  than  a  decade  after  the  statute’s 
passage, suggested in dictum that, were there a pertinent 
provision  of  a  collective-bargaining  agreement,  §203(o)
would have applied to the facts of that case—where work-