This morning, the Supreme Court made a unanimous ruling that could have repercussions for American workers everywhere. The case involved workers at an Amazon warehouse who were not compensated for the time they had to spend in line for security checks at the end of the day. (Some workers claimed they had to spend up to a half-hour in line; they weren't paid for this time.) Lawrence Hurley at Reuters quotes Justice Clarence Thomas's ruling in the case: "the screening process is not a 'principal activity' of the workers' jobs under a law called the Fair Labor Standards Act and therefore is not subject to compensation. For workers to be paid, the activity in question must be 'an intrinsic element' of the job and 'one with which the employee cannot dispense if he is to perform his principal activities,' Thomas wrote."

This strikes me as ridiculous. Let's leave aside for a moment the central thought behind this screening process—the insane allegation that every low-wage American worker is a thief who can't be trusted. (Maybe if Amazon paid their employees more, they wouldn't have to worry about their warehouse workers stuffing cheap electronics down their pants to make ends meet?) Let's just look at the facts: The screening process is mandatory. If employees decided not to go through with the screening and tried to leave without it, they would be fired. (At the very least; I imagine it might be likely that the employers would call the police on an employee who tried to leave without being screened.) Workers can't do anything else with their time while they're waiting in line to be screened. That, to me, sounds like they deserve compensation for the time they're giving the company.

This is what an America with declining membership in unions looks like. Unions probably can't help these workers; the deck is stacked against any union that tries to organize a shop like this. At this point, the only hope for workers like this is that some politician somewhere will make this issue their mission. But this is unlikely, because there's no money in it for politicians to become a champion for minimum-wage workers. And with a unanimous ruling like this one, it's likely that employers are going to get a lot more brazen with their demands on worker time. This is not a problem that will solve itself.