546US1
Unit: $$U5
[08-22-08 13:38:19] PAGES PGT: OPIN
Cite as: 546 U. S. 21 (2005)
35
Opinion of the Court
tion of that holding reflects a purpose to exclude what IBP regards as the quite similar walking time spent by respond ents before and after their work slaughtering cattle and processing meat. Even if there is ambiguity in the statute, we should construe it to effectuate that important purpose. This argument is also unpersuasive. There is a critical difference between the walking at issue in Anderson and the walking at issue in this case. In Anderson the walking preceded the employees’ principal activity; it occurred before the workday began. The relevant walking in this case oc curs after the workday begins and before it ends. Only if we were to endorse IBP’s novel submission that an activity can be sufficiently “principal” to be compensable, but not suf ficiently so to start the workday, would this case be compara ble to Anderson. Moreover, there is a significant difference between the open-ended and potentially expansive liability that might re sult from a rule that treated travel before the workday be gins as compensable, and the rule at issue in this case. In deed, for processing division knife users, the largest segment of the work force at IBP’s plant, the walking time in dispute here consumes less time than the donning and doffing activi ties that precede or follow it. It is more comparable to time spent walking between two different positions on an assem bly line than to the prework walking in Anderson. Regulations The regulations adopted by the Secretary of Labor in 1947 support respondents’ view that when donning and doffing of protective gear are compensable activities, they may also de fine the outer limits of the workday. Under those regula tions, the few minutes spent walking between the locker rooms and the production area are similar to the time spent walking between two different workplaces on the disassem bly line. See 29 CFR § 790.7(c) (2005) (explaining that the Portal-to-Portal Act does not affect the compensability of
