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Text: As enacted in 1938, the FLSA, 29 U.S.C. § 201 et seq., required employers engaged in the production of goods for commerce to pay their employees a minimum wage of "not less than 25 cents an hour," § 6(a)(1), 52 Stat. 1062, and prohibited the employment of any person for workweeks in excess of 40 hours after the second year following the legislation "unless such employee receives compensation for his employment in excess of [40] hours . . . at a rate not less than one and one-half times the regular rate at which he is employed," id., § 7(a)(3), at 1063. Neither "work" nor "workweek" is defined in the statute.[1]

Our early cases defined those terms broadly. In Tennessee Coal, Iron & R. Co. v. Muscoda Local No. 123, 321 U.S. 590 (1944), we held that time spent traveling from iron ore mine portals to underground working areas was compensable; relying on the remedial purposes of the statute and Webster's Dictionary, we described "work or employment" as "physical or mental exertion (whether burdensome or not) controlled or required by the employer and pursued necessarily and primarily for the benefit of the employer and his business." Id., at 598; see id., at 598, n. 11. The same year, in Armour & Co. v. Wantock, 323 U.S. 126 (1944), we clarified that "exertion" was not in fact necessary for an activity to constitute "work" under the FLSA. We pointed out that "an employer, if he chooses, may hire a man to do nothing, or to do nothing but wait for something to happen." Id., at 133. Two years later, in Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co., 328 U.S. 680 (1946), we defined "the statutory workweek" to "includ[e] all time during which an employee is necessarily required to be on the employer's premises, on duty or at a prescribed workplace." Id., at 690-691. Accordingly, we held that the time necessarily spent by employees walking from timeclocks near the factory entrance gate to their workstations must be treated as part of the workweek. Id., at 691-692.

The year after our decision in Anderson, Congress passed the Portal-to-Portal Act, amending certain provisions of the FLSA. Based on findings that judicial interpretations of the FLSA had superseded "long-established customs, practices, and contracts between employers and employees, thereby creating wholly unexpected liabilities, immense in amount and retroactive in operation," 61 Stat. 84, it responded with two statutory remedies, the first relating to "existing claims," id., at 85-86, and the second to "future claims," id., at 87-88. Both remedies distinguish between working time that is compensable pursuant to contract or custom and practice, on the one hand, and time that was found compensable under this Court's expansive reading of the FLSA, on the other. Like the original FLSA, however, the Portal-to-Portal Act omits any definition of the term "work."

With respect to existing claims, the Portal-to-Portal Act provided that employers would not incur liability on account of their failure to pay minimum wages or overtime compensation for any activity that was not compensable by either an express contract or an established custom or practice.[2] With respect to "future claims," the Act preserved potential liability for working time not made compensable by contract or custom but narrowed the coverage of the FLSA by excepting two activities that had been treated as compensable under our cases: walking on the employer's premises to and from the actual place of performance of the principal activity of the employee, and activities that are "preliminary or postliminary" to that principal activity.

Specifically, Part III of the Portal-to-Portal Act, entitled "FUTURE CLAIMS," provides in relevant part:

"SEC. 4. RELIEF FROM CERTAIN FUTURE CLAIMS UNDER THE FAIR LABOR STANDARDS ACT OF 1938 . . . _x0097_
"(a) Except as provided in subsection (b) [which covers work compensable by contract or custom], no employer shall be subject to any liability or punishment under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, as amended, . . . on account of the failure of such employer to pay an employee minimum wages, or to pay an employee overtime compensation, for or on account of any of the following activities of such employee engaged in on or after the date of the enactment of this Act_x0097_
"(1) walking, riding, or traveling to and from the actual place of performance of the principal activity or activities which such employee is employed to perform, and
"(2) activities which are preliminary to or postliminary to said principal activity or activities, "which occur either prior to the time on any particular workday at which such employee commences, or subsequent to the time on any particular workday at which he ceases, such principal activity or activities." 61 Stat. 86-87 (codified at 29 U.S.C. § 254(a)).
Other than its express exceptions for travel to and from the location of the employee's "principal activity," and for activities that are preliminary or postliminary to that principal activity, the Portal-to-Portal Act does not purport to change this Court's earlier descriptions of the terms "work" and "workweek," or to define the term "workday." A regulation promulgated by the Secretary of Labor shortly after its enactment concluded that the statute had no effect on the computation of hours that are worked "within" the workday. That regulation states: "[T]o the extent that activities engaged in by an employee occur after the employee commences to perform the first principal activity on a particular workday and before he ceases the performance of the last principal activity on a particular workday, the provisions of [§ 4] have no application." 29 CFR § 790.6(a) (2005).[3] Similarly, consistent with our prior decisions interpreting the FLSA, the Department of Labor has adopted the continuous workday rule, which means that the "workday" is generally defined as "the period between the commencement and completion on the same workday of an employee's principal activity or activities." § 790.6(b). These regulations have remained in effect since 1947, see 12 Fed. Reg. 7658 (1947), and no party disputes the validity of the continuous workday rule.

In 1955, eight years after the enactment of the Portal-to-Portal Act and the promulgation of these interpretive regulations, we were confronted with the question whether workers in a battery plant had a statutory right to compensation for the "time incident to changing clothes at the beginning of the shift and showering at the end, where they must make extensive use of dangerously caustic and toxic materials, and are compelled by circumstances, including vital considerations of health and hygiene, to change clothes and to shower in facilities which state law requires their employers to provide . . . ." Steiner v. Mitchell, 350 U.S. 247, 248 (1956). After distinguishing "changing clothes and showering under normal conditions" and stressing the important health and safety risks associated with the production of batteries, id., at 249, the Court endorsed the Court of Appeals' conclusion that these activities were compensable under the FLSA.

In reaching this result, we specifically agreed with the Court of Appeals that "the term `principal activity or activities' in Section 4 [of the Portal-to-Portal Act] embraces all activities which are an `integral and indispensable part of the principal activities,' and that the activities in question fall within this category." Id., at 252-253. Thus, under Steiner, activities, such as the donning and doffing of specialized protective gear, that are "performed either before or after the regular work shift, on or off the production line, are compensable under the portal-to-portal provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act if those activities are an integral and indispensable part of the principal activities for which covered workmen are employed and are not specifically excluded by Section 4(a)(1)." Id., at 256.

The principal question presented by these consolidated cases_x0097_both of which involve required protective gear that the courts below found integral and indispensable to the employees' work_x0097_is whether postdonning and predoffing walking time is specifically excluded by § 4(a)(1). We conclude that it is not.