On Dec. 9, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision declaring that it was okay for Amazon contractors to force all workers to stay every day after their shift to be searched for possible theft—and NOT get paid for that time. Because the company refuses to hire enough screeners, the process can take up to 25 minutes each day. That can add up to over 500 hours of unpaid work time each year.
Amazon contracts with hundreds of companies to staff the warehouses and then controls all aspects of the work. In this case, the company staffing the Nevada warehouses was Integrity Staffing Solutions. The lawyer representing them was Paul Clement, who was also the lead lawyer in the following cases:
June 2014 Hobby Lobby case, where the U.S. Supreme Court denied women the right to contraception/reproductive health care in private for-profit companies that decide to claim a religious objection. Although legal health insurance rights belong to employees not the employers, he argued and the Court ruled that company owner rights trump workers’ rights. Women’s lives don’t matter; billionaire corporations do. Corporations, which can’t pray, have more rights than women whose labor makes the corporation’s profit.
June 2014 ABC Broadcasting case, where he asserted the property rights of monopoly interests versus others—and this was upheld by the Court (re: the right of smaller companies to re-transmit programs).
2004 Torture and Procedure case in Rumsfeld v. Padilla. He represented the U.S. government. When asked about the government’s use of torture, he claimed that torture was never used. Now that the CIA lies are out of the bag, it is clear that torture was a part of U.S. policy and well known to administration lawyers, who in fact crafted position papers to justify it.
2003 case regarding ending limits on advertising by corporations.
There are countless reactionary lawyers who take cases to Court. And we are not arguing that there is some kind of conspiracy that connects Paul Clement and the Supreme Court justices. They just share a ruling-class view of the world. However, the coincidence that he was the lead in the Amazon case as well as Hobby Lobby and other cases does help to point out that this decision is part of a broad right-wing attack on basic rights.
Obama administration tells court to rule against workers
The Obama administration filed a brief with the Court instructing them to rule against the workers. The U.S. government uses essentially the same legal arguments and logic as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other big-business organizations.
A point stressed over and over again by the Chamber of Commerce, the Retail Litigation Center, the National Retail Association, and National Association of Manufacturers was that if the Court were to rule for the workers, there would be a flood of wage theft cases filed against them. They pointed to the already “alarming” increase in wage theft cases over the past few years. They knew that this was a big issue because they know how prevalent the practice of wage theft is.