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IBP, INC. v. ALVAREZ Opinion of the Court
§ 4(a)(2) than they do in § 4(a)(1).6 This is not only because of the normal rule of statutory interpretation that identical words used in different parts of the same statute are gener ally presumed to have the same meaning. E. g., Sullivan v. Stroop, 496 U. S. 478, 484 (1990). It is also because § 4(a)(2) refers to “said principal activity or activities.” 61 Stat. 87 (emphasis added). The “said” is an explicit reference to the use of the identical term in § 4(a)(1). Indeed, IBP has not offered any support for the unlikely proposition that Congress intended to create an intermediate category of activities that would be sufficiently “principal” to be compensable, but not sufficiently principal to commence the workday. Accepting the necessary import of our holding in Steiner, we conclude that the locker rooms where the spe cial safety gear is donned and doffed are the relevant “place of performance” of the principal activity that the employee was employed to perform within the meaning of § 4(a)(1). Walking to that place before starting work is excluded from FLSA coverage, but the statutory text does not exclude walking from that place to another area within the plant im mediately after the workday has commenced. Purpose IBP emphasizes that our decision in Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co., 328 U. S. 680, may well have been the proximate cause of the enactment of the Portal-to-Portal Act. In that case we held that the FLSA mandated compen sation for the time that employees spent walking from time clocks located near the plant entrance to their respective places of work prior to the start of their productive labor. Id., at 690–691. In IBP’s view, Congress’ forceful repudia 6 In fact, as noted above, in Steiner we specifically endorsed the view of the Court of Appeals that the definition of “principal activity or activities” in § 4 encompassed activities “ ‘integral and indispensable’ ” to those prin cipal activities. We did not make any distinction between § 4(a)(1) and § 4(a)(2). 350 U. S., at 253.
