The ruling goes beyond COVID screenings — it could reshape pre-shift pay in Illinois
Illinois's highest court ruled that the state's wage law does not let employers exclude mandatory pre-shift activities from paid time.
In a decision filed March 19, the Illinois Supreme Court answered a question that had lingered in federal courts for years: does the state's Minimum Wage Law adopt a federal provision that allows employers to treat certain pre-shift and post-shift activities as unpaid? It does not, the court held (Johnson v. Amazon.com Services, LLC, 2026 IL 132016).
The case was brought by former warehouse employees of Amazon, which owns and operates large distribution warehouses across the country, including in Illinois, where it employs more than 20,000 workers. Those warehouses run 24 hours a day, staffed by hourly, nonexempt employees whose duties consisted primarily of moving, stacking, and loading packages.
In March 2020, Amazon began requiring all hourly, nonexempt employees to undergo COVID-19 health screenings before clocking in. Workers lined up at facility entrances for temperature checks and symptom screening questions. Those who passed were given masks and allowed to start their shifts. The workers alleged the screenings took 10 to 15 minutes on average, and sometimes longer, occasionally pushing them past their scheduled start times. They were not paid for the wait.
Amazon relied on the federal Portal-to-Portal Act, which amended the Fair Labor Standards Act to exclude activities considered "preliminary or postliminary" to an employee's principal duties from compensable time. Several federal courts had previously applied that reasoning to Illinois wage claims, and the district court dismissed the workers' state-law claims on the same basis.
The state Supreme Court saw it differently. Justice Overstreet, writing for the court, found that the state's wage law makes no mention of the Portal-to-Portal Act or any exclusion for pre-shift or post-shift activities. While the law does reference specific federal provisions in four of its ten listed exceptions, the Portal-to-Portal Act is not among them.
The court also pointed to the Illinois Department of Labor's definition of "hours worked," which includes all time an employee is required to be on the employer's premises. That standard, the court noted, runs directly counter to the kind of exclusion Amazon was seeking.
For HR teams in Illinois, the takeaway is hard to miss. Time that workers are required to spend on-site before or after their shifts cannot be treated as unpaid under state law simply because federal rules might allow it. The ruling makes clear that Illinois has drawn its own boundaries around what counts as work time — and employers who assumed otherwise will need to adjust.
The Illinois Department of Labor and the state Attorney General supported the workers' position. A group of business organizations, including the Chamber of Commerce of the United States of America and the National Retail Federation, backed Amazon.
The case reached the Illinois Supreme Court after the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals referred the question, noting that no Illinois court had previously addressed the issue.
