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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.
