The company's original policy said employees could lose their job if they didn’t comply

Here’s one you don’t come across every day. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has reversed an earlier judgment in Apple’s favor and says the tech giant has to pay store employees in California for the time they spent waiting for their bags to be checked by security officers at the close of each shift.

The five-year old case began when a cadre of California-based Apple store employees filed a class action lawsuit against the company. They argued that under a...