A federal appeals court ruled in December 2025 that a staffing company can legally dock $3.00 a day ($1.50 each way) from the wages of day laborers for the ride to their job site, and owes them nothing for the time they spend waiting, traveling, or picking up the tools they need to work.

The Non-Financial Ledger

Who These Workers Actually Are

The roughly 300 workers who walked into this lawsuit are not salaried professionals who can absorb a surprise deduction. They are “daily ticket workers” — people who show up to a Pacesetter labor hall on any given morning with no guarantee of work. They sign in to say they are available. They wait. Maybe they get a ticket. Maybe they don’t. That uncertainty is the entire structure of their working life.

These workers perform construction, hospitality, and general manual labor across the Southeast. Their pay starts when they arrive at a client’s job site, and ends when they leave it. Everything that happens before and after — the commute, the wait at the hall, collecting gloves and shovels and hard hats — is, under this ruling, their own personal problem, done on their own personal time, at their own personal expense.

The jobs themselves are physically demanding enough. But the structure of daily ticket work adds a second layer of economic precarity on top of the physical toll. These workers cannot plan their weeks. They cannot predict their income. They absorb all the risk of showing up, and the company absorbs all the reward of their labor.

The $3.00 That the Court Called Optional

The court framed the $3.00 daily transportation deduction as a voluntary choice. Workers had options: their own car, public transit, a carpool, or a Pacesetter van. If they chose the van or the carpool, Pacesetter took $3.00. The legal logic is tidy. The human reality is messier. Day laborers often do not own reliable vehicles. Public transit routes do not always reach industrial job sites on early morning schedules. For workers who depend on Pacesetter’s transportation network, calling it “optional” is like calling a toll bridge optional when it is the only road across the river.

Consider what $3.00 means at the margins of minimum wage. Florida’s minimum wage in recent years has hovered around $12 to $13 per hour. A worker doing a six-hour shift earns roughly $72 to $78 before deductions. Three dollars represents between 3.8% and 4.2% of a single day’s gross pay, vanishing before they see a cent. Over a full working month of twenty days, those deductions total $60 ($60 — roughly two full tanks of gas for a compact car, or a week of groceries for one person). Over a working year, that is $720 per worker ($720 — more than many Americans spend on clothing for an entire year). Across 300 workers, that is $216,000 annually ($216,000 — enough to pay the annual salary of four full-time workers at Florida minimum wage).

The court did not interrogate those numbers. The court asked whether the transportation was primarily for the employer’s benefit, concluded it was not, and moved on. The workers are left to absorb the cost of getting to the job that makes the company money.

The Minutes That Don’t Count

Beyond the transportation deductions, the workers argued they deserved pay for three categories of time: travel to and from job sites, waiting at the labor hall for transportation after accepting a ticket, and collecting and returning tools. The court said no to all three. The legal reasoning draws on the Portal-to-Portal Act, a 1947 law that exempts “preliminary and postliminary” activities from compensable work time. The law was designed to stop workers from claiming pay for, say, driving across town before clocking in. But the daily ticket worker’s situation is not a standard commute from home to a fixed office. These workers have no fixed job site. Every day is a fresh assignment. The labor hall is the center of the entire employment relationship, and yet it is also, legally, nowhere.

The waiting time finding is particularly sharp. Workers testified they used their waiting time at the labor hall to watch the news, buy coffee, smoke a cigarette, or browse a nearby store. The court cited this as evidence that the waiting time was “personal” and therefore not compensable. But the workers were only at that labor hall in the first place because that is where the company requires them to be to receive work. Calling those minutes “free time” because a worker used them to drink coffee does not change the fact that the worker had to be standing in that specific location, in that specific building, for that specific company, in order to have any shot at earning any money that day.

The tool collection finding adds another dimension. Workers who needed goggles, gloves, hard hats, shovels, or work boots had to collect them from the labor hall and return them at the end of the day. The court acknowledged that tools could be required for certain jobs, but noted that workers could bring their own equipment, and that some jobs required no tools at all. Because tool collection was not universal and daily, the court ruled it was not “integral and indispensable.” The result: the time spent equipping yourself to safely perform physical labor is your time, not the company’s, and the company owes you nothing for it.

Legal Receipts

The Exact Language the Court Used to Rule Against Workers

“An activity is ‘integral and indispensable’ if it is ‘an intrinsic element’ of the principal activities — something that an employee must perform to carry out her primary duties.”

— Court Opinion, citing Integrity Staffing Solutions, Inc. v. Busk, 574 U.S. 27, 33 (2014). This is the test that blocked pay for travel time, tool time, and waiting time.

“Workers did not even need to wait for transportation — under the transportation agreement, they could proceed directly to the jobsite if they wished.”

— Court Opinion, Section III.B.3. Used to deny compensation for waiting time, framing structural dependency as voluntary personal choice.

“On top of that, workers typically used their waiting time — both for assignments and for Pacesetter transportation — doing as they pleased. One testified that he watched the news or went to buy coffee while waiting for a job assignment. Another added that he would sit in the waiting room, sleep, go outside to smoke a cigarette, or pop by a food store to buy coffee.”

— Court Opinion, Section III.B.3. The court characterized workers’ attempts to cope with unpaid waiting time as evidence they were not “working.”

“The employment understanding clearly is that the pay or the time of the employee begins and ends at the customer’s establishment, waiting for assignments at the central location or in travel from there to the customer’s establishment and return would not be compensable worktime.”

— Court Opinion, citing U.S. Department of Labor Field Operations Handbook 31c09 (Aug. 10, 2016). The DOL’s own handbook was deployed to deny the workers’ claims.

“While tools can increase the length of a daily ticket worker’s employment, a worker may even arrive at a jobsite without the recommended tool and still receive work. That makes this case unlike Alvarez, where ‘the donning of certain types of protective gear’ — in hazardous occupations, for example — was deemed ‘always essential if the worker is to do his job.'”

— Court Opinion, Section III.B.2. The court distinguished day laborers from workers in hazardous industries, ruling that because some workers sometimes worked without tools, no worker’s tool time was compensable.

Societal Impact Mapping

Economic Inequality: The Law Built for the Company, Enforced on the Worker

This case sits inside a decades-old legal architecture that systematically transfers the costs of employment onto the workers who can least afford them. The Portal-to-Portal Act of 1947 was designed to prevent workers from claiming compensation for genuinely peripheral activities — the walk from a parking lot to a factory floor, for example. The temp staffing industry has stretched that framework to cover the entire period between a worker arriving at a company facility and beginning formal work at a client’s location. Every minute of that gap is a minute the company does not have to pay for.

Pacesetter’s business model depends structurally on daily ticket workers absorbing costs and time that salaried workers never see. A permanent employee with a fixed office location does not pay their employer for the ride to work. A permanent employee who needs a tool for their job does not clock out while they pick it up. But for temporary labor — already the most economically precarious class of worker — these costs are routine and court-approved. The result is a legal system that functions as a subsidy for the temp staffing industry, paid for by the labor of the workers who have the fewest resources and the least bargaining power.

The court’s ruling also blocks collective action. By denying class certification for the sub-class of workers who may have been charged more than the statutory $1.50-per-leg transportation limit under the Florida Labor Pool Act, the court determined that the individualized nature of each overcharge made group litigation unmanageable. This is a common outcome in wage cases involving low-income workers: the harm to each individual is small enough that solo litigation is economically irrational, but the court finds group litigation procedurally inconvenient. The result is that no one gets relief. The company keeps the money.

Public Health: Unpaid Time, Unequipped Workers, and the Cost of “Optional” Safety Gear

The tool-collection finding carries a public health dimension the court did not address. Among the items Pacesetter lent workers were goggles, gloves, masks, and work boots — basic personal protective equipment for physical labor. The court ruled that time spent collecting this equipment is not compensable because some workers bring their own gear, and some jobs do not require it. But the direct implication of that ruling is that the time a worker spends equipping themselves to work safely is legally worthless. It does not count. It is not the company’s concern.

For workers in construction, hospitality prep, landscaping, and general labor — the industries Pacesetter serves — working without proper PPE carries real physical risk. The court’s framework provides zero legal incentive for a company to streamline or compensate the safety-equipment process, because the law does not require it. Workers who are rushing through an unpaid equipment pickup, or who skip it entirely because they cannot afford the time, bear the physical consequences.

The Cost of a Life Metric

What Now?

The People Still Making These Decisions

The named corporate entities in this case are Pacesetter Personnel Service, Inc.; Pacesetter Personnel Service of Florida, Inc.; Florida Staffing Service, Inc.; and Tampa Service Company, Inc. All four operate as a coordinated network serving clients across the Southeast in construction, hospitality, and general labor industries.

The Regulators Who Should Be Watching

• U.S. Department of Labor, Wage and Hour Division: Responsible for enforcing the Fair Labor Standards Act. The court cited a DOL audit of Pacesetter’s Orlando hall from 2016–2018 that found no minimum-wage violations. That audit covered two years, one location. The rest of the network remains un-audited in this record.
• Florida Department of Economic Opportunity: Oversees enforcement of the Florida Minimum Wage Act and the Florida Labor Pool Act, both cited in this case. Workers charged above the $1.50-per-leg statutory maximum for transportation may still have individual claims under state law.
• Florida Attorney General’s Office: Has authority to investigate violations of the Florida Labor Pool Act on behalf of workers when individual litigation is economically unviable.
• National Labor Relations Board: Daily ticket workers have the legal right to organize collectively. The NLRB enforces that right. Temp staffing workers are covered.
• U.S. Congress: The Portal-to-Portal Act of 1947 is the statute that makes all of these rulings possible. Legislative reform to extend compensability protections to temp and gig workers is the structural fix the courts cannot provide.

What You Can Do Right Now

Connect with organizations already doing this work. The National Employment Law Project (NELP) and Florida Legal Services both advocate for temporary and low-wage workers and can connect individuals with legal resources. If you or someone you know works as a daily ticket laborer and believes wages have been docked below minimum wage, document every deduction on every pay stub. Local worker centers and mutual aid networks — especially those serving construction and hospitality workers in Broward County — are the ground-level infrastructure that litigation and legislation alone cannot replace. Organize your coworkers. Share your pay stubs. Know your rights under the Florida Labor Pool Act. The company counted on these workers not comparing notes. Start comparing notes.