Just in time for the holidays, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled on December 9, 2014 that the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”), which is the federal law governing the payment of wages and overtime, does not require employers to pay certain employees for time spent passing through security screening after shifts, even if it is required by the employer.

The case, Integrity Staffing Solutions Inc. v. Busk, concerned plaintiffs who were employees assigned by a staffing company to package products sold by Amazon at Amazon warehouses. The employees were required to pass through metal detectors at the warehouse after each shift to prevent theft of company products, which according to the employees took as long as 25 minutes. Believing that the screening time was compensable under the FLSA because the activity was required by the employer, the employees filed an action against the staffing company to recover lost wages for time spent passing through the screening.

In Busk, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the screening time was not compensable. In doing so, the Court reasoned that a job activity is compensable if it is “integral and indispensable to the principal activities that an employee is employed to perform” and “is an intrinsic element of those activities and one with which the employee cannot dispense if he is to perform his principal activities.” In applying this test, the Court noted that because the company did not employ its workers to undergo security screenings, but to instead package products for shipment, the security screening was not an intrinsic element of the employees’ principal job activities to ship products for Amazon.

The Supreme Court’s decision is a victory for not just employers who use security screenings, but for other employers who require their employees to perform preliminary and postliminary activities. While determining if these job activities are compensable in other contexts must still be decided on a case by case basis, the Court’s ruling in Busk does appear to narrow the traditional test for determining if time is compensable under the FLSA by requiring that an activity must be “an intrinsic element” of the employees’ principal job activities. Employers should pay close attention to see if and how this test is applied in other contexts such as donning and doffing claims.