Dive Brief:
- A federal judge has tossed a class action lawsuit brought against Apple by retail employees seeking back pay for time spent waiting in line each day during mandatory personal bag searches, according to CNET.com.
- US District Court Judge William Alsup's ruling in San Francisco over the weekend means Apple will not have to pay more than 12,000 current and ex-employees at 52 stores throughout California for time spent waiting to have their bags searched as they left for breaks or went home from work.
- CNET reports that it's Apple's second employment lawsuit resolution in the past two months. In September, Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe paid $415 million to settle an anti-poaching civil lawsuit that accused the tech giants of agreeing to keep their hands off each other's employees, which was ruled as unfair to employees.
Dive Insight:
This ruling occurred close to a year after the U.S. Supreme Court decided Amazon did not have to pay its employees for the time spent in security check lines. In that December 2014 decision, the SCOTUS overturned a lower court's ruling that Amazon should compensate workers for their time because the screenings were a part of its employees' jobs and benefited the company. In his ruling for Apple, Alsup wrote that employees bothered by the policy had an option - leave their bags home.
"Rather than prohibiting employees from bringing bags and personal Apple devices into the store altogether," he said in his decision, "Apple took a milder approach to theft prevention and offered its employees the option to bring bags and personal Apple devices into a store subject to the condition that such items must be searched when they leave the store."
