Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery: Burden Shifting and Recordkeeping

In Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co., 328 U.S. 680 (1946), the Supreme Court held that when an employer fails to keep accurate records of hours worked, an employee can prove an unpaid wage claim through reasonable estimates, and the burden then shifts to the employer to come forward with evidence of the precise hours or to show the estimate is unreasonable. If the employer cannot, a court may award damages based on the worker’s approximation alone.¹ Nearly eighty years later, that framework is still the starting point in federal wage litigation whenever an employer’s timekeeping is incomplete.

The Factory Dispute Behind the Ruling

The case came out of a pottery factory in Mt. Clemens, Michigan. Workers punched a time clock at the plant entrance and then walked to their workstations, where they spent roughly fourteen minutes putting on aprons and overalls, greasing their arms, preparing equipment, turning on machinery, and sharpening tools. The same routine ran in reverse at the end of the shift. None of that time made it onto the payroll.¹

The employer argued those tasks fell outside the workday. The Supreme Court disagreed. Time spent walking to workstations and performing setup activities on the employer’s premises counted as compensable work under the Fair Labor Standards Act. But the more lasting piece of the opinion was procedural: what a court should do when the employer’s own poor records make it impossible for workers to prove exactly how many minutes they lost.

The Two-Step Burden-Shifting Framework

A worker bringing an FLSA claim starts with the burden of proof. They must show they performed work and were not properly compensated for it.¹ That is straightforward when good records exist. It becomes a trap when the employer never recorded the disputed hours in the first place, because demanding mathematical precision from the employee would reward the very negligence the statute was written to prevent.

The Court solved that problem by lowering the bar for the first step. An employee satisfies the initial burden by producing “sufficient evidence to show the amount and extent of that work as a matter of just and reasonable inference.”¹ In practice, that means testimony from the worker or coworkers, personal notes, text messages, emails showing early arrivals or late departures, or any other evidence that paints a plausible picture of the unpaid hours. Precision is not required. Plausibility is.

Once the employee clears that threshold, the burden flips. The employer must come forward with evidence of the precise hours worked, or with evidence showing the employee’s estimates are unreasonable.¹ An employer that kept no time logs usually has nothing to offer, and its own recordkeeping failure is the reason.

If the employer cannot rebut the reasonable inference, the court may award damages based on the worker’s approximation. The award does not have to be exact. The Court explicitly accepted that some imprecision is unavoidable when the employer created the evidentiary gap.¹ The risk of imprecision falls on the party that was supposed to keep the books.

Why Recordkeeping Sits at the Center

The framework only makes sense against the employer’s affirmative duty to track hours. Under 29 U.S.C. § 211(c), every covered employer must create and maintain records of each employee’s wages, hours, and working conditions.² Department of Labor regulations fill in the specifics: daily start and stop times, total hours per workweek, and the basis for wage calculations.

The FLSA does not require any particular technology. Time clocks, digital systems, biometric scanners, or employee self-reporting all satisfy the rule as long as the result is complete and accurate.³ Basic payroll records must be kept for at least three years; supporting documents like time cards, work schedules, and wage rate tables must be kept for at least two.⁴

This is why the Mt. Clemens rule is so hard on employers who cut corners. When a company can produce clean, contemporaneous logs, the claim usually rises or falls on the numbers in those records. When it cannot, the entire evidentiary picture tilts against it. The instinct to argue “they can’t prove exactly how long they worked” collapses once the framework is applied, because the employer was the one responsible for creating the proof.

What Counts as Compensable Work Under the Decision

Mt. Clemens also identified several pre-shift and post-shift activities that fall inside the compensable workday. At the pottery factory, these included walking from the time clock to the workstation, putting on protective clothing, preparing tools, and switching on machinery.¹ The Court treated these tasks as part of the statutory workweek because the employer required them and they involved physical effort under the employer’s control. The same reasoning reached cleanup at the end of a shift: removing protective gear, shutting down equipment, or washing off hazardous materials.

How Congress Narrowed the Ruling

Mt. Clemens triggered a wave of back-pay lawsuits. Congress responded the following year with the Portal-to-Portal Act of 1947, which carved two categories of time back out of the compensable workday: walking or traveling to and from the place where the employee’s main job duties are performed, and preliminary or postliminary activities that occur before or after the principal work.⁵

Those exclusions apply only when the activity falls outside the employee’s principal duties. Courts developed the “integral and indispensable” test to draw the line. An activity that happens before or after the main job is still compensable if it is an intrinsic part of the work the employee was hired to do and cannot be skipped. In Integrity Staffing Solutions, Inc. v. Busk (2014), the Supreme Court held that post-shift security screenings at a warehouse were not compensable because the workers were hired to fill orders, not to undergo security checks. The fact that the employer required the screenings did not, by itself, make them integral to the principal work.⁶

Compare that with a meatpacking worker who must put on specialized protective equipment before handling carcasses. That gear is inseparable from the job, making the donning and doffing time compensable even under the Portal-to-Portal Act’s restrictions. Modern wage cases about pre-shift and post-shift time usually turn on which side of that line the activity sits on. What the Portal-to-Portal Act did not touch, though, was the burden-shifting rule itself. That part of Mt. Clemens survived intact.

Why the Standard Still Governs Modern Wage Cases

The 1946 framework remains the default in virtually every FLSA case where recordkeeping is at issue. An employer that fails to track its workers’ time cannot later hide behind the absence of those records. If the employee produces a reasonable estimate, the employer either rebuts it with real evidence or accepts the court’s approximation.

For workers, the practical takeaway is to keep whatever documentation you can build on your own. Personal notes, photographs of arrival and departure times, text messages, and coworker statements all feed into the “just and reasonable inference” the standard requires. For employers, the lesson has not changed since the pottery factory: keep accurate time records, or be prepared to accept a court’s best guess at what you owe.

1
Legal Information Institute. Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co., 328 U.S. 680 (1946)
2
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 29 USC 211 – Collection of Data
3
U.S. Department of Labor. Fact Sheet #21: Recordkeeping Requirements Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)
4
eCFR. 29 CFR 516.6 – Records to Be Preserved for Two Years
5
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 29 USC 254 – Relief From Liability and Punishment Under the Fair Labor Standards Act
6
Justia. Integrity Staffing Solutions, Inc. v. Busk, 574 U.S. 27 (2014)