To Be Paid, Or Not to
Be Paid, That is the Question: Supreme
Court Wrestles With Clothing to Reach the Naked Truth. Sandifer
v. U.S. Steel Corp. (2014) 2014 DJDAR 1024.
My first thought about this U.S.
Supreme Court case: We filter out the
best legal talent for high office to decide what the word “clothing” means?
Frankly, I’m inclined to write a
ditty about “donning and doffing” – words so often repeated by these noble
jurists that you would think the terms to have mystical significance, perhaps
reaching to the level of “these penumbral rights” used by Justice Douglas in Griswold vs. Connecticut (1965) 381 U.S.
479.
Instead of the weighty issue of
whether a Planned Parenthood defendant could be prosecuted for providing
contraceptives to a married couple, the issue in the recent case of Sandifer v. U.S. Steel Corp. (2014) 2014
DJDAR 1024, was the question of just what is “clothing?” Perhaps it is like defining “the absence of
clothing,” and we can say that we can know what it is by understanding what it
is not. In this way, Justice Potter
Stewart to described his
threshold test for obscenity in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964) by writing famously: “I know it when I see it.”
Much of the business that occupies these great nine minds is
the interpretation of federal statutes.
Sandifer is a look into the naked truth:
Supreme Court justices too have mundane daily work tasks that require
their attention – in this case, does “donning and doffing” of work equipment
qualify as “changing clothes” under Section 203(o) of the Fair Labor and Standards Act? For those who care, the Court held that they
and their lesser colleagues of the District Courts, need not spend precious
juristic thought sorting out the time inserting an ear plug versus the donning
of a shirt. If the equipment was a minor
part of the major time taken to “don and doff” then it was all to be treated as
“clothing” under the Act. Thus, these
employees were not to be paid for getting dressed (or undressed) for work.
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