Amazon Fought for Six Years to Avoid Paying Workers for Mandatory COVID Screenings

The Non-Financial Ledger

These were hourly warehouse workers moving through a pandemic. They stacked, loaded, and moved packages for Amazon while the outside world was in lockdown. Before they could even start earning a paycheck for the day, Amazon required them to pass a symptom check, a process that put their bodies on the clock without putting their wages on the clock.

The screening happened on Amazon’s property. It happened under Amazon’s control. Workers could not skip it and could not get paid until it was finished. The court record describes this as a “non-trivial imposition” on people who were compensated by the hour, meaning every minute mattered to their paycheck in a way it would not have mattered to a salaried employee.

Legal Receipts

“The screenings amounted to potentially one hour per week of uncompensated overtime on Amazon’s property, under Amazon’s control—a non-trivial imposition for those compensated on an hourly basis.”

“Amazon argues that the COVID-19 screenings were not ‘necessarily and primarily’ for Amazon’s benefit, and as a result, were not compensable work under the IMWL.”

“IDOL defines ‘hours worked’ to include all time an employee is required to be on the employer’s premises, which contradicts the potential applicability of any such exclusion.”

“[N]o employer shall employ any of his employees for a workweek of more than 40 hours unless such employee receives compensation for his employment in excess of the hours above specified at a rate not less than 1 1/2 times the regular rate at which he is employed.”

Regulatory Gray Zones

Amazon built its defense on a gap between federal and state wage law, betting that a decades-old federal carve-out would quietly cover a pandemic-era policy no one wrote it for.

• Amazon argued that Illinois overtime law automatically incorporates the federal Portal-to-Portal Act of 1947, a law that exempts “preliminary activities” from paid work, even though the Illinois statute never mentions that federal law by name.
• This ambiguity was serious enough that the Seventh Circuit could not resolve it alone. The court had to formally certify the question to the Illinois Supreme Court, an unusual step reserved for genuinely unsettled state law.
• Amazon also tried to import the federal “benefit of the employer” test from a 1944 Supreme Court case into Illinois law, even though Illinois regulators never adopted that test for general “hours worked” determinations.
• The Illinois Supreme Court found that state labor regulators had every opportunity to adopt these federal limitations and chose not to, closing the exact gray zone Amazon was relying on.

Legal Minimalism: The Letter but Not the Spirit

Amazon’s policy technically complied with its own clock-in system while ignoring what Illinois regulators actually require to count as paid work.

• Illinois Department of Labor regulations define “hours worked” as all time an employee is required to be on the employer’s premises, on duty, or at a prescribed place of work.
• Amazon’s mandatory screening met every part of that definition: workers were on Amazon’s property, could not leave, and could not begin their shift until it was done.
• Amazon’s policy simply did not start the clock until the screening was already finished, technically compliant with its own timekeeping system while sidestepping the regulation’s plain purpose.

Societal Impact Mapping

Economic Inequality

The workers affected by this policy were paid by the hour, meaning every unpaid minute was a direct cut to their income, not an abstraction.

• The uncompensated screening time hit hourly warehouse workers specifically, the segment of Amazon’s workforce with the least cushion to absorb lost pay.
• The loss was recurring and structural: potentially one hour of unpaid time every single week, not a one-time inconvenience.
• It took a proposed class action, a district court ruling, a certified question to the Illinois Supreme Court, and a federal appeals court reversal, roughly six years of litigation, just to get a court to say this time should have been paid.
• Workers had to keep working under the disputed policy for years while the legal question remained unresolved.

Who Pays? Following the Cost

The cost of Amazon’s own pandemic safety measure was not absorbed by Amazon. It was absorbed by the people standing in the screening line.

• Amazon required the screenings to protect its own operations during the pandemic, but the time cost of that requirement was shifted onto hourly workers rather than paid by the company that mandated it.
• The scale of the shift was potentially one hour of unpaid labor per worker, per week, across the proposed class of Amazon warehouse employees named in the case.
• That unpaid time compounds: a worker screened five days a week for months or years absorbs a running total of hours Amazon never had to pay for while the case was pending.

This Is the System Working as Intended

Nothing about this case required a novel legal theory to resolve. It required years of litigation to confirm what the plain text of a wage statute already said.

• A federal district court initially sided with Amazon in 2023, based on a legal theory the Illinois Supreme Court later called unsupported by the statute’s actual text.
• It took a formal certification to the state’s highest court, an unusual and time-consuming step, just to get a definitive answer on a question the statute’s language already answered.
• In the meantime, Amazon’s underlying policy was never paused. Workers kept undergoing unpaid screenings while the legal question worked its way through three separate court decisions.
• The default outcome, absent years of litigation initiated by the workers themselves, was that Amazon’s unpaid-screening policy stood.

What a Legitimate Fix Looks Like

This case exposes how easily a company can withhold pay for years by leaning on ambiguity between state and federal wage law, forcing workers to litigate all the way to a state supreme court just to get a straight answer.

What Now?

The case returns to the district court for further proceedings. Here’s where to direct pressure and attention.

• Watchlist: Illinois Department of Labor (IDOL), the agency responsible for defining and enforcing “hours worked” under state law.
• Watchlist: U.S. Department of Labor (USDOL), whose federal wage guidance Amazon attempted to import into this state case.
• If you worked a job that required a mandatory pre-shift process you weren’t paid for, document the dates, duration, and requirement in writing now, before memories or records fade.
• Connect with worker organizing groups tracking wage theft and misclassification claims in your state.