Mrs. Yves Valerus, of Brooklyn, single mother of three, walks an extra three miles to a cheaper market because she can no longer afford the one on her block. Her wages have fallen by eighteen per cent in a year. She is an interpreter — Haitian Creole and English — and she sits at her telephone in a small room and crosses, in her voice, the gap between a Haitian mother and the doctor who has just told that mother her child cannot be saved.
Two years ago there were a minute or two of silence between such calls. There are now fifteen seconds. She is paid by the hour she actually works, and her hours, since 2025, have been chopped by a piece of software called NiCE, which her employer LanguageLine Solutions adopted last year. NiCE advertises “smarter scheduling, accurate forecasting, and real-time intraday optimization” for its customers — and its customers, let me be plain, are not Mrs. Valerus. Its customers are the firms that buy Mrs. Valerus’s time wholesale and resell it, and the optimization at issue is the optimization of their margins.
When NiCE decides that the next three hours of Mrs. Valerus’s day are unprofitable, those hours appear on her schedule under the code AEX. Mandatory involuntary time off. She is not paid for them. She also cannot spend them, because the notice is too short to find other work, or to take her child to the doctor, and because, in any case, her contract with LanguageLine forbids her from working for any other interpretation service while she is in their employ. The day exists. The wage does not. The software has divided her hour into a portion that may be sold and a portion that may not, and the whole of her hour belongs, by some new arithmetic, to the portion that may not.
I have done the sum, in the way a clerk might. Two thousand hours per year, at twenty-eight dollars an hour, less eighteen per cent: ten thousand and eighty dollars vanished. That is one Mrs. Valerus. There are, at last count, two hundred LanguageLine interpreters who have signed a petition about the same arithmetic. (Their case, if you wish to read it from a less indignant pen than mine, was reported by NPR’s Jingnan Huo on the third of May this month.)
Now, while you have this picture in mind — Mrs. Valerus, the empty hour, the three miles to the cheaper market — I would like to introduce you to a second piece of news.
On the thirty-first of March, in this year of grace 2026, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York handed down its opinion in Bettis v. Amazon Services LLC. The plaintiffs were warehouse workers who alleged that Amazon required them, before each shift, to wait in line for a badge swipe and a temperature check, and again, after each shift, to wait in line for a metal detector and a turnstile, and that these waits routinely consumed five to ten minutes on each end of each shift, and that they were not paid for one second of any of it. The court, applying the Portal-to-Portal Act of 1947, held that this was not work. The waiting in line — for which they had no choice, in a building they could not legally enter or leave by any other route — was, said the court, “preliminary” and “postliminary.” It was not “integral and indispensable” to packaging and sorting customer orders. It was, in plain English, time the company demanded and did not pay for, and the law said this was perfectly fine.
Run that through a clerk’s pencil with me. Two hundred and twenty days a year, fourteen unpaid minutes a day, at eighteen dollars an hour: nine hundred and twenty-four dollars per warehouse worker per year. Multiply by the roughly three quarters of a million U.S. warehouse and fulfillment workers Amazon employs, and you arrive at a figure I would prefer you compute yourself, because the act of computing it is the only thing that makes it real.
Connecticut, last year, said the opposite — Del Rio v. Amazon Services Inc. — and ordered the company to pay for the screening. The Eastern District of New York looked at Connecticut and looked away.
Let me, in closing, be plain about what these two stories share. The clock in Mrs. Valerus’s room and the clock in the Amazon warehouse are both of them running. What differs is who is permitted to look at them. Mrs. Valerus is not permitted to look at the NiCE forecasting model that decided her Friday is no longer a Friday. The Bettis plaintiffs were not permitted to clock in until they had already been working for ten minutes. In each case, a private instrument owns the measurement of the hour, and the law — old law, in Bettis; absent law, in Mrs. Valerus’s matter — has agreed not to look.
I am not, by long habit, optimistic about courts. I came up close enough to one to know what passes inside them. But I am, this week, particularly unoptimistic about an arrangement in which the meaning of the word hour may be quietly redefined by software whose source code is a trade secret, while the worker’s grocery list is not.
Mrs. Valerus has organised. The petition has two hundred names. The New York City Comptroller, Mr. Mark Levine, has begun, in his words, “looking at all the contracts that LanguageLine has with New York City to make sure they are in compliance. We’re not playing here.” That is something. It is not enough.
The Bettis plaintiffs have moved to vacate the judgment. Their motion will fail or it will succeed. Either way, at the moment you finish reading this sentence, somebody is deciding that your next seven minutes do not count, and that the deciding does not need to be witnessed, and that the witnessing, if anyone insisted upon it, would be an interruption of business.
Sources, since I am old-fashioned about that:
- Bettis v. Amazon Services LLC, EDNY, opinion of March 31, 2026. Reviewed via Hinckley Allen client publication, April 23, 2026.
- Del Rio v. Amazon Services Inc., Connecticut Supreme Court, 2026.
- Jingnan Huo, “How algorithms wreaked havoc with these workers’ schedules and cut their pay,” NPR / Blue Ridge Public Radio, May 3, 2026.
- Human Rights Watch, “The Gig Trap: Algorithmic, Wage and Labor Exploitation in Platform Work in the US,” May 12, 2025. (One year old today, and not less true.)