Recent comments by Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas seemed to suggest that Amazon’s warehouse workers should unionize.
The Supreme Court came down unanimously Tuesday against a group of temporary workers employed in Amazon warehouses who believed they should be compensated for mandatory theft screenings at the conclusion of their shifts.
When addressing the arguments in the court’s opinion, Thomas said, “These arguments are properly presented to the employer at the bargaining table … not to a court in an [Fair Labor Standards Act] claim,” according to Huffington Post.
However, workers in Amazon’s U.S. warehouses are all nonunion and thus cannot be part of the bargaining table — so it is unclear if Thomas was being ironic or throwing a suggestion the way of the employees.
Both the liberal and conservative justices found that the theft screenings were not “integral and indispensable” to the work the employees did, thus not worthy of compensation under federal law. This decision overturned a prior decision made by the federal appeals court.
Two former employees had sued the hiring company, Integrity Staffing Solutions, that placed them in the Amazon warehouse, saying that they wanted to be paid for the roughly 25 minutes a day they were spent going through the screenings after work.
