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Text: IBP emphasizes that our decision in Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co., 328 U.S. 680, may well have been the proximate cause of the enactment of the Portal-to-Portal Act. In that case we held that the FLSA mandated compensation for the time that employees spent walking from timeclocks located near the plant entrance to their respective places of work prior to the start of their productive labor. Id., at 690-691. In IBP's view, Congress' forceful repudiation of that holding reflects a purpose to exclude what IBP regards as the quite similar walking time spent by respondents before and after their work slaughtering cattle and processing meat. Even if there is ambiguity in the statute, we should construe it to effectuate that important purpose.

This argument is also unpersuasive. There is a critical difference between the walking at issue in Anderson and the walking at issue in this case. In Anderson the walking preceded the employees' principal activity; it occurred before the workday began. The relevant walking in this case occurs after the workday begins and before it ends. Only if we were to endorse IBP's novel submission that an activity can be sufficiently "principal" to be compensable, but not sufficiently so to start the workday, would this case be comparable to Anderson.

Moreover, there is a significant difference between the open-ended and potentially expansive liability that might result from a rule that treated travel before the workday begins as compensable, and the rule at issue in this case. Indeed, for processing division knife users, the largest segment of the work force at IBP's plant, the walking time in dispute here consumes less time than the donning and doffing activities that precede or follow it. It is more comparable to time spent walking between two different positions on an assembly line than to the prework walking in Anderson.