It Will Be A "Clothes" Call: Supreme Court to Decide if Work Clothes, Are "Clothes"

Are work clothes “clothes” under the FLSA?  And how much weight should be given to the Department of Labor’s opinion on this issue, especially when that opinion has changed more than once?

Yesterday, the Supreme Court agreed to answer these questions when it agreed to review the Seventh Circuit’s decision in Sandifer v. U.S. Steel, which we discussed in a post on May 2012.  In short, the plaintiffs in Sandifer claimed that they were owed wages for time spent changing into and out of their work clothes in a locker room at the plant.  But the company argued that it did not have to pay for these activities because the parties had agreed that time spent changing clothes would not be compensable during collective bargaining.  And FLSA §203(o) states that time spent “changing clothes . . . at the beginning or end of each workday” is excluded from compensable time if it is treated as non-work time by a collective bargaining agreement.  So that raised the question: are work clothes or personal protective gear “clothes” under the FLSA?

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