The Supreme Court agreed has agreed to hear a case over whether the retail giant Ama­zon stole wages from ware­house work­ers at its U.S. dis­tri­b­u­tion facil­i­ties by forc­ing them to wait in long lines for secu­ri­ty screen­ing with­out pay.

The case, Integri­ty Staffing Solu­tions, Inc. v. Busk, will be con­sid­ered dur­ing the high court’s Octo­ber term, with a deci­sion expect­ed by ear­ly next year. At issue is the prop­er appli­ca­tion of the fed­er­al Fair Labor Stan­dards Act (FLSA) and a relat­ed law, the Por­tal-to-Por­tal Act, both of which gov­ern over­time pay­ment for wage-earners.

Accord­ing to court doc­u­ments, ware­house work­ers Jessie Busk and Lau­rie Cas­tro were employed by the tem­po­rary labor agency Integri­ty Staffing Solu­tions between 2008 and 2010 to work at sep­a­rate Ama­zon ware­hous­es in Neva­da. At the end of the work shifts, all work­ers were required to under­go secu­ri­ty-screen­ing pro­ce­dures designed to pre­vent work­er theft. The screen­ing cre­at­ed long lines and wait­ing times for the work­ers, typ­i­cal­ly about 25 min­utes, on a dai­ly basis. In 2010, Bust and Cas­tro filed a class action law­suit under FLSA, claim­ing that they should be com­pen­sat­ed for this time.

Mark Thier­man, the Reno, Nev., lawyer rep­re­sent­ing Busk and Cas­tro, says the law­suit has since been joined by anoth­er 500 work­ers from oth­er ware­hous­es. If the suit is ful­ly suc­cess­ful, he tells In These Times, the set­tle­ment could include back pay for as many as 500,000 work­ers (both per­ma­nent and tem­po­rary) from all of Amazon’s more than 50 U.S. warehouses.

After work­ing its way through the low­er courts, the case reached the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Dis­trict in 2013, which over­ruled pri­or deci­sions and found in favor of Busk and Cas­tro. Integri­ty Staffing then appealed the Ninth Cir­cuit deci­sion to the Supreme Court.

The case has attract­ed the atten­tion of pro-busi­ness lob­by groups, which often fight inter­pre­ta­tions of the FLSA that would lead to an expan­sion of over­time pay. The Retail Lit­i­ga­tion Cen­ter, the Soci­ety for Human Resources Man­age­ment, the U.S. Cham­ber of Com­merce and the Nation­al Asso­ci­a­tion of Man­u­fac­tur­ers filed a joint ami­cus brief in the case in favor of deny­ing addi­tion­al wage pay­ments to the workers.

A com­men­tary from attor­neys at Lit­tler Mendel­son, which is rep­re­sent­ing Integri­ty Staffing, explains the stake employ­ers have in Busk. ​“The ques­tion is of great import for the nation’s employ­ers as secu­ri­ty screen­ing is becom­ing an ever more com­mon prac­tice in the work­place,” write attor­neys Neil Alexan­der, Rick Roskel­ley and Cory Walk­er. ​“Indeed, the Ninth Circuit’s deter­mi­na­tion in Busk has already trig­gered a spate of class-action suits filed by employ­ees seek­ing back pay for time spent under­go­ing pre- or post-shift secu­ri­ty mea­sures. If allowed to stand, the Ninth Circuit’s deter­mi­na­tion could result in mas­sive retroac­tive lia­bil­i­ty stem­ming from such suits.”

Ama­zon has come under renewed scruti­ny since its announce­ment last year that it would build new ware­hous­es and hire an addi­tion­al 7,000 work­ers to sup­ple­ment an exist­ing per­ma­nent work­force of about 20,000. The non-union com­pa­ny was also the tar­get of a failed union orga­niz­ing cam­paign this year at a ware­house in Delaware, and has been the object of high-pro­file agi­ta­tion by unions in Germany.

Some labor lawyers wor­ry that the Supreme Court’s deci­sion to hear the case sig­nals that it may seek to reverse the Ninth Cir­cuit Court’s pre­vi­ous deci­sion in favor of the ware­house work­ers. ​“It’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly good news for work­ers,” says Cather­ine Ruck­elshaus, Gen­er­al Coun­sel for the Nation­al Employ­ment Law Project (NELP). How­ev­er, she also notes that the high court has ruled in favor of work­ers in some sim­i­lar cas­es in the past. ​“It’s hard to tell how it will come out,” she says.

Also wary is Brooke Lier­man, an attor­ney with the Bal­ti­more firm of Brown, Gold­stein and Levy, which has rep­re­sent­ed work­ers in FLSA cas­es in the past. ​“It’s always a lit­tle wor­ry­ing when [the Supreme Court] agrees to take a case from the Ninth Cir­cuit,” she says. Where­as the Ninth Cir­cuit is con­sid­ered by labor lawyers to be rel­a­tive­ly lib­er­al, the high court is con­sid­ered very con­ser­v­a­tive, Lier­man says, so there is con­cern that some Supreme Court judges are pre­dis­posed to over­rule the Ninth Cir­cuit. ​“There are jus­tices on the Supreme Court who want to roll back the rights of work­ers,” she says.

Notwith­stand­ing the pro-busi­ness lean­ing of the Supreme Court, Lier­man believes that the Ama­zon work­ers have a strong case. ​“The secu­ri­ty screen­ing is some­thing that is done sole­ly for the ben­e­fit of the com­pa­ny, and they have com­plete con­trol of the process. That’s impor­tant in these kinds of cas­es,” she says. Ear­li­er court rul­ings on secu­ri­ty screen­ings have made a care­ful dis­tinc­tion, she explains, between screen­ing that are required by law or gov­ern­ment reg­u­la­tion, and screen­ings that are imposed at the will of the employ­er. Work­ers have a bet­ter chance at get­ting com­pen­sa­tion when the screen­ings are ordered by the employ­er sole­ly for its own benefit.

Integri­ty Staffing attor­neys at Lit­tler Mendel­son have hired Wash­ing­ton lawyer Paul D. Clement to act as the labor agency’s attor­ney of record. Clement is a Bush appointee who served in the Jus­tice Depart­ment and as Solic­i­tor Gen­er­al. He was also the lead attor­ney in the attempt to have the Afford­able Care Act, or Oba­macare, ruled uncon­sti­tu­tion­al by the Supreme Court.

Thier­man says he’s not intim­i­dat­ed by the high-priced legal team that will oppose him at the high court’s oral argu­ment. ​“Com­mon sense is on our side. I don’t know what [the Supreme Court] will do, but hope­ful­ly they’ll do the right thing.”