The Court was looking at whether screenings violated the Fair Labor Standards Act, and specifically at 245 of the Portal-to-Portal Act, which restricted the req

The Court was looking at whether screenings violated the Fair Labor Standards Act, and specifically at 245 of the Portal-to-Portal Act, which restricted the requirement to pay for pre/post work activity. I get two parts of the rationale, and it's bizarre, but I'm pretty sure the result is that even if Integrity fires you for not doing it, the work still doesn't have to be paid. First, the Court found that performing screenings is not what employees are hired to do: they're not the point of the job, just a condition of employment. This is fairly obvious, but necessary to establish because someone who was paid to do screenings (e.g. as a physical security pen-tester) would obviously need to be paid for that. Second, it found that those screenings are not "integral" to the job. This sounds odd for a required screening, but the context is specifically about the work of the job and not the terms of employment. Pre/post work like donning safety gear or a toolbelt is (legally or practically) necessary to complete the work, so past cases have found that it's effectively part of the labor and must be paid. This is also the context of the final holding: if Integrity could eliminate the screenings without affecting the workers' ability to pick and package goods, they must not be an intrinsic aspect of the job. The Portal to Portal Act says that any labor which benefits the employer must be paid, while generally asserting that other pre/post work does not need to be paid, with commuting as a specific example of necessary-but-unpaid time. So "you'll get fired if you don't do it" isn't actually enough to qualify. Perversely, the result of the act is that employers can't require unpaid, necessary tasks, but can require unpaid, unnecessary tasks. On one level, this makes sense: if putting on a toolbelt, wetsuit, or whatever else is necessary for the work, every employer will require it and failing to pay for that time is clearly harmful. But if an employer makes you recite a corporate chant before starting work, you can quit and go somewhere else. On another level, the contract system seriously distorts the logic: you can only be employed at that Amazon warehouse by fulfilling this restriction. Ultimately, though, the court doesn't care about that. Congress passed a law which effectively says useless work time doesn't need to be paid, so this practice is legal. Which I believe holds all the way through the absurd case: if these screenings took 80 hours a week, they'd still be legal to not pay.