Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/13pdf/12-417_9okb.pdf
Page Number: 17

14 

SANDIFER v. UNITED STATES STEEL CORP. 

Opinion of the Court 

select among trifles, de minimis non curat lex is not Latin 
for close enough for government work.

That  said,  we  nonetheless  agree  with  the  basic  percep-
tion  of  the  Courts  of  Appeals  that  it  is  most  unlikely 
Congress  meant  §203(o)  to  convert  federal  judges  into
time-study professionals.  That is especially so since the conse-
quence of dispensing with the intricate exercise of separat-
ing the minutes spent clothes-changing and washing from
the  minutes  devoted  to  other  activities  is  not  to  prevent
compensation  for  the  uncovered  segments,  but  merely  to 
leave the issue of compensation to the process of collective 
bargaining.  We  think  it  is  possible  to  give  the  text  of 
§203(o)  a  meaning  that  avoids  such  relatively  inconse-
quential judicial involvement in “a morass of difficult, fact-
specific determinations,” Sepulveda, 591 F. 3d, at 218. 

The  forerunner  of  §203(o)—the  Portal-to-Portal  Act
provision  whose  interpretation  by  the  Labor  Department 
prompted  its  enactment—focused  narrowly  on  the  activi-
ties  involved:  “activities  which  are  preliminary  to  or
postliminary to [the employee’s] principal activity or activ-
ities.”  §254(a)(2).  Section 203(o), by contrast, is addressed 
not  to  certain  “activities,”  but  to  “time  spent”  on  certain
activities, viz., “changing clothes or washing.”  Just as one 
can  speak  of  “spending  the  day  skiing”  even  when  less-
than-negligible portions of the day are spent having lunch
or  drinking  hot  toddies,  so  also  one  can  speak  of  “time 
spent  changing  clothes  and  washing”  when  the  vast  pre-
ponderance  of  the  period  in  question  is  devoted  to  those
activities.  To  be  sure,  such  an  imprecise  and  colloquial 
usage will not ordinarily be attributed to a statutory text,
but  for  the  reasons  we  have  discussed  we  think  that  ap-
propriate  here.    The  question  for  courts  is  whether  the
period at issue can, on the whole, be fairly characterized as
“time  spent  in  changing  clothes  or  washing.”  If  an  em-
ployee devotes the vast majority of the time in question to 
putting  on  and  off  equipment  or  other  non-clothes  items