Wage and hour · Federal · FLSA
Sandifer v. United States Steel Corp.
571 U.S. 220 · Supreme Court of the United States · 2014
Steelworkers sought pay for time spent putting on and taking off protective gear — flame-retardant jacket and pants, hood, gloves, boots, hard hat, glasses, earplugs, and a respirator — arguing this time was compensable rather than excluded as “changing clothes” under the collective bargaining provision.
The Court read “changing clothes” to cover most of the items at issue and held that the time was not compensable where the period is, on the whole, spent changing clothes.
Collective action; judgment for the employer affirmed
Reported outcome
Affirmed for the employer; the donning-and-doffing time was not compensable here.
Completeness reading
79/100
ignita-completeness-v1 · illustrative
Preview. Not legal advice. Attorney-reviewed: false.
The events, kept in order.
Drawn from the reported decision. Nothing is interpreted at this stage — each entry simply holds when it happened and what happened.
Every shift
Protective gear put on before the shift
Workers donned flame-retardant clothing, hood, gloves, boots, hard hat, glasses, earplugs, and a respirator.
Protected activity or key conduct
Every shift
Time not recorded as compensable
Under the collective bargaining provision, this time was treated as non-compensable clothes-changing.
Dispute
Some items argued not to be clothes
Glasses, earplugs, and the respirator were argued to fall outside “clothes.”
Outcome
Period assessed as a whole
The Court asked whether the period was on the whole devoted to changing clothes, rather than parsing each second.
What the engine reads here
Wage matters are won or lost on measurement. The pattern signal is per-item, per-shift duration across many workers — quantitative, repetitive, and only visible when workers keep contemporaneous timing rather than estimates.
Pattern and class signal
High class and collective potential. One uniform practice applied to a whole shift population is the cleanest form of aggregated wage claim.
Preview. Not legal advice. Attorney-reviewed: false.
Your own record
Every matter here began as small, ordinary entries someone almost didn't keep.