Source: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/571/12-417/opinion3.html
Timestamp: 2017-05-25 16:04:24
Document Index: 220295965

Matched Legal Cases: ['§201', '§203', '§251', '§251', '§203', '§203', '§203', '§203', '§207', '§203', '§213', '§203', '§785']

Sandifer v. United States Steel Corp. (Opinion of the Court) :: 571 U.S. ___ (2014) :: Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center Log In
› Sandifer v. United States Steel Corp.
Sandifer v. United States Steel Corp. 571 U.S. ___ (2014)
Justice Scalia delivered the opinion of the Court.[1]*
29 U. S. C. §201 et seq. (2006 ed. and Supp. V).
Petitioner Clifton Sandifer, among others, filed suit under the Fair Labor Standards Act against respondent United States Steel Corporation in the District Court for the Northern District of Indiana. The plaintiffs in this putative collective action are a group of current or former employees of respondent’s steelmaking facilities.[2] As relevant here, they seek backpay for time spent donning and doffing various pieces of protective gear. Petitioners assert that respondent requires workers to wear all of the items because of hazards regularly encountered in steel plants.
Petitioners point specifically to 12 of what they state are the most common kinds of required protective gear: a flame-retardant jacket, pair of pants, and hood; a hardhat; a “snood”; “wristlets”; work gloves; leggings; “metatarsal” boots; safety glasses; earplugs; and a respirator.[3] At bottom, petitioners want to be paid for the time they have spent putting on and taking off those objects. In the aggregate, the amount of time—and thus money—involved is likely to be quite large. Because this donning-and-doffing time would otherwise be compensable under the Act, U. S. Steel’s contention of noncompensability stands or falls upon the validity of a provision of its collective-bargaining agreement with petitioners’ union, which says that this time is noncompensable.[4] The validity of that provision depends, in turn, upon the applicability of
The District Court granted summary judgment in pertinent part to U. S. Steel, holding that donning and doffing the protective gear constituted “changing clothes” within the meaning of §203(o). No. 2:07–CV–443 RM, 2009 WL 3430222, *4–*10 (ND Ind., Oct. 15, 2009). The District Court further assumed that even if certain items—the hardhat, glasses, and earplugs—were not “clothes,” the time spent donning and doffing them was “de minimis” and hence noncompensable. Id., at *6. The Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit upheld those conclusions. 678 F. 3d 590, 593–595 (2012).[5]
546 U. S. 21
–26 (2005). This Court gave those terms a broad reading, culminating in its holding in Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co.,
29 U. S. C. §251 et seq. (2006 ed. and Supp. V). §251(a).
We begin by examining the meaning of the word “clothes.”[6] It is a “fundamental canon of statutory construction” that, “unless otherwise defined, words will be interpreted as taking their ordinary, contemporary, common meaning.” Perrin v. United States,
–285 (1880) (citing Maillard v. Lawrence, 16 How. 251 (1854)), nothing in the text or context of §203(o) suggests anything other than the ordinary meaning of “clothes.”
Petitioners contend that any attempt at a general definition of “clothes” will cast a net so vast as to capture all manner of marginal things—from bandoliers to barrettes to bandages. Yet even acknowledging that it may be impossible to eliminate all vagueness when interpreting a word as wide-ranging as “clothes,” petitioners’ fanciful hypotheticals give us little pause. The statutory context makes clear that the “clothes” referred to are items that are integral to job performance; the donning and doffing of other items would create no claim to compensation under the Act, and hence no need for the §203(o) exception. Moreover, even with respect to items that can be regarded as integral to job performance, our definition does not embrace the view, adopted by some Courts of Appeals, that “clothes” means essentially anything worn on the body—including accessories, tools, and so forth. See, e.g., Salazar v. Butterball, LLC, 644 F. 3d 1130, 1139–1140 (CA10 2011) (“clothes” are “items or garments worn by a person” and include “knife holders”). The construction we adopt today is considerably more contained. Many accessories—necklaces and knapsacks, for instance—are not “both designed and used to cover the body.” Nor are tools “commonly regarded as articles of dress.” Our definition leaves room for distinguishing between clothes and wearable items that are not clothes, such as some equipment and devices.[7]
The object of §203(o) is to permit collective bargaining over the compensability of clothes-changing time and to promote the predictability achieved through mutually beneficial negotiation. There can be little predictability, and hence little meaningful negotiation, if “changing” means only “substituting.” Whether one actually exchanges street clothes for work clothes or simply layers garments atop one another after arriving on the job site is often a matter of purely personal choice. That choice may be influenced by such happenstances and vagaries as what month it is, what styles are in vogue, what time the employee wakes up, what mode of transportation he uses, and so on. As the Fourth Circuit has put it, if the statute imposed a substitution requirement “compensation for putting on a company-issued shirt might turn on something as trivial as whether the employee did or did not take off the t-shirt he wore into work that day.” Sepulveda v. Allen Family Foods, Inc., 591 F. 3d 209, 216 (2009). Where another reading is textually permissible, §203(o) should not be read to allow workers to opt into or out of its coverage at random or at will.[8]
We doubt that the de minimis doctrine can properly be applied to the present case. To be sure, Anderson included “putting on aprons and overalls” and “removing shirts” as activities to which “it is appropriate to apply a de minimis doctrine.” Id., at 692–693. It said that, however, in the context of determining what preliminary activities had to be counted as part of the gross workweek under §207(a) of the Fair Labor Standards Act.[9] A de minimis doctrine does not fit comfortably within the statute at issue here, which, it can fairly be said, is all about trifles—the relatively insignificant periods of time in which employees wash up and put on various items of clothing needed for their jobs. Or to put it in the context of the present case, there is no more reason to disregard the minute or so necessary to put on glasses, earplugs, and respirators, than there is to regard the minute or so necessary to put on a snood. If the statute in question requires courts to select among trifles, de minimis non curat lex is not Latin for close enough for government work.
* joins this opinion except as to footnote 7.
Petitioners filed this action under
, which establishes a cause of action that may be maintained “by any one or more employees for and in behalf of himself or themselves and other employees similarly situated.” Pending resolution of the instant summary-judgment dispute, a Magistrate Judge set aside a motion to certify the suit as a collective action, see No. 2:07–CV–443 RM, 2009 WL 3430222, *1, n. 1 (ND Ind., Oct. 15, 2009), but petitioners assert that their ranks are about 800 strong.
Petitioners also sought, , backpay for time spent traveling between the locker rooms where they don and doff at least some of the protective gear and their workstations. The District Court denied that portion of respondent’s motion for summary judgment, 2009 WL 3430222, *11, and the Seventh Circuit reversed, 678 F. 3d, at 595–598. That issue is not before this Court, so we express no opinion on it.
Although the Labor Department has construed §203() on a number of occasions, the Government has expressly declined to ask us to defer to those interpretations, which have vacillated considerably over the years.
Petitioners and their insist that equipment can never be clothes. While we do not believe that every wearable piece of equipment qualifies—for example, a wristwatch—our construction of “clothes” does not exclude all objects that could conceivably be characterized as equipment.
This Court has stated that “exemptions” in the Fair Labor Standards Act “are to be narrowly construed against the employers seeking to assert them.” v. ,
. We need not disapprove that statement to resolve the present case. The exemptions from the Act generally reside in §213, which is entitled “Exemptions” and classifies certain kinds of workers as uncovered by various provisions. Thus, in v. , 567 U. S. ___, ___–___, n. 21 (2012) (slip op., at 19–20, n. 21), we declared the narrow-construction principle inapplicable to a provision appearing in §203, entitled “Definitions.”
We note, moreover, that even in that context, the current regulations of the Labor Department apply a stricter standard than expressed. They specify that “[a]n employer may not arbitrarily fail to count as hours worked any part, however small, of the employee’s fixed or regular working time or practically ascertainable period of time he is regularly required to spend on duties assigned to him.” 29 CFR §785.47.
The time workers spent donning and doffing necessary protective gear is not compensable under the Fa...	Read the full annotations for this case.