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SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
_________________
No. 12–417
_________________
CLIFTON SANDIFER, et al., PETITIONERS v.
UNITED STATES STEEL CORPORATION
on writ of certiorari to the united states
court of appeals for the seventh circuit
[January 27, 2014]
Justice Scalia
delivered the opinion of the Court.[
1]*
The question before us
is the meaning of the phrase “changing clothes” as it
appears in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, 52Stat. 1060, as
amended, 29 U. S. C. §201 et seq. (2006 ed. and
Supp. V).
I. Facts and Procedural History
Petitioner Clifton
Sandifer, among others, filed suit under the Fair Labor Standards
Act against respondent United States Steel Corporation in the
District Court for the Northern District of Indiana. The plaintiffs
in this putative collective action are a group of current or former
employees of respondent’s steelmaking facilities.[
2] As relevant here, they seek backpay
for time spent donning and doffing various pieces of protective
gear. Petitioners assert that respondent requires workers to wear
all of the items because of hazards regularly encountered in steel
plants.
Petitioners point
specifically to 12 of what they state are the most common kinds of
required protective gear: a flame-retardant jacket, pair of pants,
and hood; a hardhat; a “snood”;
“wristlets”; work gloves; leggings;
“metatarsal” boots; safety glasses; earplugs; and a
respirator.[
3] At bottom,
petitioners want to be paid for the time they have spent putting on
and taking off those objects. In the aggregate, the amount of
time—and thus money—involved is likely to be quite
large. Because this donning-and-doffing time would otherwise be
compensable under the Act, U. S. Steel’s contention of
noncompensability stands or falls upon the validity of a provision
of its collective-bargaining agreement with petitioners’
union, which says that this time is noncompensable.[
4] The validity of that provision depends, in
turn, upon the applicability of 29 U. S. C. §203(o)
to the time at issue. That subsection allows parties to decide, as
part of a collective-bargaining agreement, that “time spent
in changing clothes . . . at the beginning or end of each
workday” is noncompensable.
The District Court
granted summary judgment in pertinent part to U. S. Steel,
holding that donning and doffing the protective gear constituted
“changing clothes” within the meaning of §203(o).
No. 2:07–CV–443 RM, 2009 WL 3430222, *4–*10 (ND
Ind., Oct. 15, 2009). The District Court further assumed that even
if certain items—the hardhat, glasses, and
earplugs—were not “clothes,” the time spent
donning and doffing them was “de minimis” and hence
noncompensable. Id., at *6. The Court of Appeals for the Seventh
Circuit upheld those conclusions. 678 F. 3d 590, 593–595
(2012).[
5]
We granted certiorari,
568 U. S. ___ (2013), and now affirm.
II. Legal Background
The Fair Labor
Standards Act, enacted in 1938, governs minimum wages and maximum
hours for non-exempt “employees who in any workweek [are]
engaged in commerce or in the production of goods for commerce, or
[are] employed in an enterprise engaged in commerce or in the
production of goods for commerce.” 29 U. S. C.
§206(a) (minimum wages); §207(a) (maximum hours); see
§213 (exemptions). The Act provides that
“employee” generally means “any individual
employed by an employer,” §203(e)(1), and, in turn,
provides that to “employ” is “to suffer or permit
to work,” §203(g).
The Act did not,
however, define the key terms “work” and
“workweek”—an omission that soon let loose a
landslide of litigation. See IBP, Inc. v. Alvarez, 546 U. S.
21 –26 (2005). This Court gave those terms a broad reading,
culminating in its holding in Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co.,
328 U. S. 680 (1946) , that “the statutory workweek
includes 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. That period, Anderson
explained, encompassed time spent “pursu[ing] certain
preliminary activities after arriving . . . , such as
putting on aprons and overalls [and] removing shirts.” Id.,
at 692–693. “These activities,” the Court
declared, “are clearly work” under the Act. Id., at
693.
Organized labor seized
on the Court’s expansive construction of compensability by
filing what became known as “portal” actions (a
reference to the “portals” or entrances to mines, at
which workers put on their gear). “PORTAL PAY SUITS EXCEED A
BILLION,” announced a newspaper headline in late 1946.
N. Y. Times, Dec. 29, 1946, p. 1. Stating that the Fair Labor
Standards Act had been “interpreted judicially in disregard
of long-established customs, practices, and contracts between
employers and employees,” Congress responded by passing the
Portal-to-Portal Act of 1947, 61Stat. 84, as amended, 29
U. S. C. §251 et seq. (2006 ed. and Supp. V).
§251(a).
The Portal-to-Portal
Act limited the scope of employers’ liability in various
ways. As relevant here, it excluded from mandatorily compensable
time
“activities which are preliminary to
or postliminary to [the] principal activity or activities [that an
employee is employed to perform], 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.” 61Stat. 87,
29 U. S. C. §254(a)(2).
The Department of Labor
promulgated a regulation explaining that the Portal-to-Portal Act
did not alter what is known as the “continuous workday
rule,” under which compensable time comprises “the
period between the commencement and completion on the same workday
of an employee’s principal activity or
activities . . . [,] whether or not the
employee engages in work throughout all of that period.” 12
Fed. Reg. 7658 (1947); 29 CFR §790.6(b) (2013). Of particular
importance to this case, a Labor Department interpretive bulletin
also specified that whereas “changing clothes” and
“washing up or showering” “would be considered
‘preliminary’ or ‘postliminary’
activities” when “performed outside the workday and
. . . under the conditions normally present,” those
same activities “may in certain situations be so directly
related to the specific work the employee is employed to perform
that [they] would be regarded as an integral part of the
employee’s ‘principal activity.’ ” 12
Fed. Reg. 7659, and n. 49; 29 CFR §790.7, and n. 49.
In 1949, Congress
amended the Fair Labor Standards Act to address the conduct
discussed in that interpretive bulletin—changing clothes and
washing—by adding the provision presently at issue:
“Hours Worked.—In determining
for the purposes of [the minimum-wage and maximum-hours sections]
of this title the hours for which an employee is employed, there
shall be excluded any time spent in changing clothes or washing at
the beginning or end of each workday which was excluded from
measured working time during the week involved by the express terms
of or by custom or practice under a bona fide collective-bargaining
agreement applicable to the particular employee.” 63Stat.
911, 29 U. S. C. §203(o).
Simply put, the statute provides that the
compensability of time spent changing clothes or washing is a
subject appropriately committed to collective bargaining.
In Steiner v. Mitchell,
350 U. S. 247 (1956) , the Court echoed the Labor
Department’s 1947 regulations by holding that “changing
clothes and showering” can, under some circumstances, be
considered “an integral and indispensable part of the
principal activities for which covered workmen are employed,”
reasoning that §203(o) “clear[ly] impli[ed]” as
much. Id., at 254–256. And in IBP, we applied Steiner to
treat as compensable the donning and doffing of protective gear
somewhat similar to that at issue here, 546 U. S., at 30. We
said that “any activity that is ‘integral and
indispensable’ to a ‘principal activity’ is
itself a ‘principal activity’ ” under
§254(a), id., at 37.
As relevant to the
question before us, U. S. Steel does not dispute the Seventh
Circuit’s conclusion that “[h]ad the clothes-changing
time in this case not been rendered noncompensable pursuant to
[§]203(o), it would have been a principal activity.” 678
F. 3d, at 596. Petitioners, however, quarrel with the premise,
arguing that the donning and doffing of protective gear does not
qualify as “changing clothes.”
III. Analysis
A. “Clothes”
We begin by examining
the meaning of the word “clothes.”[
6] It is a “fundamental canon of statutory
construction” that, “unless otherwise defined, words
will be interpreted as taking their ordinary, contemporary, common
meaning.” Perrin v. United States, 444 U. S. 37, 42
(1979) .
Dictionaries from the
era of §203(o)’s enactment indicate that
“clothes” denotes items that are both designed and used
to cover the body and are commonly regarded as articles of dress.
See Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English
Language 507 (2d ed. 1950) (Webster’s Second) (defining
“clothes” as “[c]overing for the human body;
dress; vestments; vesture”); see also, e.g., 2 Oxford English
Dictionary 524 (1933) (defining “clothes” as
“[c]overing for the person; wearing apparel; dress, raiment,
vesture”). That is what we hold to be the meaning of the word
as used in §203(o). Although a statute may make “a
departure from the natural and popular acceptation of
language,” Greenleaf v. Goodrich, 101 U. S. 278
–285 (1880) (citing Maillard v. Lawrence, 16 How. 251
(1854)), nothing in the text or context of §203(o) suggests
anything other than the ordinary meaning of
“clothes.”
Petitioners argue that
the word “clothes” is too indeterminate to be ascribed
any general meaning but that, whatever it includes, it necessarily
excludes items designed and used to protect against workplace
hazards. That position creates a distinction between
“protection,” on the one hand, and “decency or
comfort,” on the other—a distinction that petitioners
appear to have derived from Webster’s Second, which
elaborates that “clothes” is “a general term for
whatever covering is worn, or is made to be worn, for decency or
comfort.” Webster’s Second 507 (emphasis added). But
that definition does not exclude, either explicitly or implicitly,
items with a protective function, since “protection”
and “comfort” are not incompatible, and are often
synonymous. A parasol protects against the sun, enhancing the
comfort of the bearer—just as work gloves protect against
scrapes and cuts, enhancing the comfort of the wearer. Petitioners
further assert that protective items of apparel are referred to as
“clothing” rather than “clothes.” They
point out that, when introduced by the adjective
“protective,” the noun “clothing” is used
more commonly than “clothes.” That is true enough, but
it seems to us explained by euphonic preference rather than
difference in meaning. We see no basis for the proposition that the
unmodified term “clothes” somehow omits protective
clothing.
Petitioners’
proffered distinction, moreover, runs the risk of reducing
§203(o) to near nothingness. The statutory compensation
requirement to which §203(o) provides an exception embraces
the changing of clothes only when that conduct constitutes
“an integral and indispensable part of the principal
activities for which covered workmen are employed.” Steiner,
350 U. S., at 256. But protective gear is the only clothing
that is integral and indispensable to the work of factory workers,
butchers, longshoremen, and a host of other occupations.
Petitioners’ definition of “clothes” would
largely limit the application of §203(o) to what might be
called workers’ costumes, worn by such employees as waiters,
doormen, and train conductors. Petitioners insist that their
definition excludes only items with some specific
work-hazard-related protective function, but that limitation
essentially abandons the assertion that clothes are for decency or
comfort, leaving no basis whatever for the distinction.
Petitioners’
position is also incompatible with the historical context
surrounding §203(o)’s passage, since it flatly
contradicts an illustration provided by the Labor
Department’s 1947 regulations to show how “changing
clothes” could be intimately related to a principal activity.
See 29 CFR §790.7, and n. 49. Those regulations cited the
situation in which “an employee in a chemical
plant . . . cannot perform his [job] without
putting on certain clothes” and specified that “[s]uch
a situation may exist where the changing of clothes on the
employer’s premises is required by law, by rules of the
employer, or by the nature of the work.” 12 Fed. Reg. 7660,
and n. 65; 29 CFR §790.8(c), and n. 65. And
petitioners’ position contradicts this Court’s only
prior opinion purporting to interpret §203(o). Steiner,
announced less than a decade after the statute’s passage,
suggested in dictum that, were there a pertinent provision of a
collective-bargaining agreement, §203(o) would have applied to
the facts of that case—where workers “ma[d]e extensive
use of dangerously caustic and toxic materials, and [we]re
compelled by circumstances, including vital considerations of
health and hygiene, to change clothes” on the job site. 350
U. S., at 248, 254–255.
Petitioners contend
that any attempt at a general definition of “clothes”
will cast a net so vast as to capture all manner of marginal
things—from bandoliers to barrettes to bandages. Yet even
acknowledging that it may be impossible to eliminate all vagueness
when interpreting a word as wide-ranging as “clothes,”
petitioners’ fanciful hypotheticals give us little pause. The
statutory context makes clear that the “clothes”
referred to are items that are integral to job performance; the
donning and doffing of other items would create no claim to
compensation under the Act, and hence no need for the §203(o)
exception. Moreover, even with respect to items that can be
regarded as integral to job performance, our definition does not
embrace the view, adopted by some Courts of Appeals, that
“clothes” means essentially anything worn on the
body—including accessories, tools, and so forth. See, e.g.,
Salazar v. Butterball, LLC, 644 F. 3d 1130, 1139–1140
(CA10 2011) (“clothes” are “items or garments
worn by a person” and include “knife holders”).
The construction we adopt today is considerably more contained.
Many accessories—necklaces and knapsacks, for
instance—are not “both designed and used to cover the
body.” Nor are tools “commonly regarded as articles of
dress.” Our definition leaves room for distinguishing between
clothes and wearable items that are not clothes, such as some
equipment and devices.[
7]
Respondent and its
amici, by contrast, give the term in question a capacious
construction, effectively echoing the Courts of Appeals mentioned
above. On this view, “clothes” encompasses the entire
outfit that one puts on to be ready for work. That interpretation
is, to be sure, more readily administrable, but it is even more
devoid of a textual foundation than petitioners’ offering.
Congress could have declared bargainable under §203(o)
“time spent in changing outfits,” or “time spent
in putting on and off all the items needed for work.” For
better or worse, it used the narrower word “clothes.”
“The role of this Court is to apply the statute as it is
written—even if we think some other approach might accord
with good policy.” Burrage v. United States, ante at 14
(internal quotation marks and brackets omitted).
B. “Changing”
Having settled upon
the meaning of “clothes,” we must now consider the
meaning of “changing.” Petitioners assert that when
used with certain objects—such as “tire,”
“diaper,” or, indeed, “clothes”—the
term “changing” connotes substitution. That is
undoubtedly true. See Webster’s Second 448 (defining
“change” as “to make substitutionof, for, or
among, often among things of the same kind. . . ;
as, to change one’s clothes”). One would not normally
say he has changed clothes when he puts on an overcoat. Petitioners
conclude from this that items of protective gear that are put on
over the employee’s street clothes are not covered by
§203(o).
We disagree. Although
it is true that the normal meaning of “changing
clothes” connotes substitution, the phrase is certainly able
to have a different import. The term “changing” carried
two common meanings at the time of §203(o)’s enactment:
to “substitute” and to “alter.” See, e.g.,
2 Oxford English Dictionary 268 (defining “change,”
among other verb forms, as “to substitute another (or others)
for, replace by another (or others)” and “[t]o make (a
thing) other than it was; to render different, alter, modify,
transmute”). We think that despite the usual meaning of
“changing clothes,” the broader statutory context makes
it plain that “time spent in changing clothes” includes
time spent in altering dress.
The object of
§203(o) is to permit collective bargaining over the
compensability of clothes-changing time and to promote the
predictability achieved through mutually beneficial negotiation.
There can be little predictability, and hence little meaningful
negotiation, if “changing” means only
“substituting.” Whether one actually exchanges street
clothes for work clothes or simply layers garments atop one another
after arriving on the job site is often a matter of purely personal
choice. That choice may be influenced by such happenstances and
vagaries as what month it is, what styles are in vogue, what time
the employee wakes up, what mode of transportation he uses, and so
on. As the Fourth Circuit has put it, if the statute imposed a
substitution requirement “compensation for putting on a
company-issued shirt might turn on something as trivial as whether
the employee did or did not take off the t-shirt he wore into work
that day.” Sepulveda v. Allen Family Foods, Inc., 591
F. 3d 209, 216 (2009). Where another reading is textually
permissible, §203(o) should not be read to allow workers to
opt into or out of its coverage at random or at will.[
8]
C. Application
Applying the
foregoing principles to the facts of this case, we hold that
petitioners’ donning and doffing of the protective gear at
issue qualifies as “changing clothes” within the
meaning of §203(o).
Petitioners have
pointed to 12 particular items: a flame-retardant jacket, pair of
pants, and hood; a hardhat; a snood; wristlets; work gloves;
leggings; metatarsal boots; safety glasses; earplugs; and a
respirator. The first nine clearly fit within the interpretation of
“clothes” elaborated above: they are both designed and
used to cover the body and are commonly regarded as articles of
dress. That proposition is obvious with respect to the jacket,
pants, hood, and gloves. The hardhat is simply a type of hat. The
snood is basically a hood that also covers the neck and upper
shoulder area; on the ski slopes, one might call it a
“balaclava.” The wristlets are essentially detached
shirtsleeves. The leggings look much like traditional legwarmers,
but with straps. And the metatarsal boots—more commonly known
as “steel-toed” boots—are just a special kind of
shoe.
The remaining three
items, by contrast, do not satisfy our standard. Whereas glasses
and earplugs may have a covering function, we do not believe that
they are commonly regarded as articles of dress. And a respirator
obviously falls short on both grounds. The question is whether the
time devoted to the putting on and off of these items must be
deducted from the noncompensable time. If so, federal judges must
be assigned the task of separating the minutes spent
clothes-changing and washing from the minutes devoted to other
activities during the period in question.
Some Courts of Appeals,
including the Court of Appeals in this case, have sought to avoid,
or at least mitigate, this difficulty by invoking the doctrine de
minimis non curat lex (the law does not take account of trifles).
This, they hold, enables them to declare noncompensable a few
minutes actually spent on something other than
clothes-changing—to wit, donning and doffing non-clothes
items.
Although the roots of
the de minimis doctrine stretch to ancient soil, its application in
the present context began with Anderson. There, the Court declared
that because “[s]plit-second absurdities are not justified by
the actualities of working conditions or by the policy of the Fair
Labor Standards Act,” such “trifles” as “a
few seconds or minutes of work beyond the scheduled working
hours” may be “disregarded.” 328 U. S., at
692. “We [thus] do not . . . preclude the
application of a de minimis rule.” Ibid.
We doubt that the de
minimis doctrine can properly be applied to the present case. To be
sure, Anderson included “putting on aprons and
overalls” and “removing shirts” as activities to
which “it is appropriate to apply a de minimis
doctrine.” Id., at 692–693. It said that, however, in
the context of determining what preliminary activities had to be
counted as part of the gross workweek under §207(a) of the
Fair Labor Standards Act.[
9] A
de minimis doctrine does not fit comfortably within the statute at
issue here, which, it can fairly be said, is all about
trifles—the relatively insignificant periods of time in which
employees wash up and put on various items of clothing needed for
their jobs. Or to put it in the context of the present case, there
is no more reason to disregard the minute or so necessary to put on
glasses, earplugs, and respirators, than there is to regard the
minute or so necessary to put on a snood. If the statute in
question requires courts to select among trifles, de minimis non
curat lex is not Latin for close enough for government work.
That said, we
nonetheless agree with the basic perception of the Courts of
Appeals that it is most unlikelyCongress meant §203(o) to
convert federal judges into time-study professionals. That is
especially so since the conse-quence of dispensing with the
intricate exercise of separating the minutes spent clothes-changing
and washing from the minutes devoted to other activities is not to
prevent compensation for the uncovered segments, but merely to
leave the issue of compensation to the process of collective
bargaining. We think it is possible to give the text of
§203(o) a meaning that avoids such relatively inconsequential
judicial involvement in “a morass of difficult, fact-specific
determinations,” Sepulveda, 591 F. 3d, at 218.
The forerunner of
§203(o)—the Portal-to-Portal Act provision whose
interpretation by the Labor Department prompted its
enactment—focused narrowly on the activities involved:
“activities which are preliminary to orpostliminary to [the
employee’s] principal activity or activities.”
§254(a)(2). Section 203(o), by contrast, is addressed not to
certain “activities,” but to “time spent”
on certain activities, viz., “changing clothes or
washing.” Just as one can speak of “spending the day
skiing” even when less-than-negligible portions of the day
are spent having lunch or drinking hot toddies, so also one can
speak of “time spent changing clothes and washing” when
the vast preponderance of the period in question is devoted to
those activities. To be sure, such an imprecise and colloquial
usage will not ordinarily be attributed to a statutory text, but
for the reasons we have discussed we think that appropriate here.
The question for courts is whether the period at issue can, on the
whole, be fairly characterized as “time spent in changing
clothes or washing.” If an employee devotes the vast majority
of the time in question to putting on and off equipment or other
non-clothes items (perhaps a diver’s suit and tank) the
entire period would not qualify as “time spent in changing
clothes” under §203(o), even if some clothes items were
donned and doffed as well. But if the vast majority of the time is
spent in donning and doffing “clothes” as we have
defined that term, the entire period qualifies, and the time spent
putting on and off other items need not be subtracted.
In the present case,
the District Court stated that “the time expended by each
employee donning and doffing” safety glasses and earplugs
“is minimal,” 2009 WL 3430222, *6, a conclusion with
which the Seventh Circuit agreed, 678 F. 3d, at 593. As for
respirators, the District Court stated that they “are kept
and put on as needed at job locations,” 2009 WL 3430222, *2,
which would render the time spent donning and doffing them part of
an employee’s normal workday and thus beyond the scope of
§203(o). The Seventh Circuit did not address respirators at
all, and we are not inclined to disturb the District Court’s
factual conclusion.
* * *
The judgment of the
Court of Appeals is affirmed.
It is so ordered.
