In Sandifer v. U.S. Steel Corp., the Supreme Court – in an opinion authored by Justice Scalia – considered the meaning of the term “changing clothes” as used in Section 203(o) of the Fair Labor Standards Act, 29 U.S.C. § 203(o).
That statute provides:
Hours Worked. In determining for the purposes of [29 U.S.C. §§ 206, 207] 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.
Plaintiffs are a group of employees of U.S. Steel’s steelmaking facilities seeking backpay for time spent “donning and doffing” (that is, putting on and taking off) various pieces of protective gear, namely, a flame-retardant jacket, a pair of pants, a hood, a hardhat, a “snood”, “wristlets”, work gloves, leggings, metatarsal boots, safety glasses, earplugs, and a respirator.
The Court affirmed the Seventh Circuit’s decision that time spent “donning and doffing” the protective gear constituted “changing clothes” within the meaning of the statute.
Citing dictionaries “from the era of § 203(o)’s enactment”, the Court held that “clothes” means “items that are both designed and used to cover the body and are commonly regarded as articles of dress.” Nothing in the statute’s text or context suggested departing from the word’s ordinary meaning.
Turning to the word “changing”, it rejected the employees’ argument that “changing” necessarily means “substitution” and hence that “items of protective gear that are put on over the employee’s street clothes are not covered by § 203(o).” The Court reasoned:
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.”
Applying these principles, the Court held that the employees’ “donning and doffing of the protective gear at issue constitutes ‘changing clothes’ within the meaning of § 203(o)”, but proceeded to explain that glasses, earplugs, and respirator did not qualify.
It concluded by noting:
Section 203(o) … 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.