Daily Bafflements

• Amazon and its workers are heading to the Supreme Court today with a battle over whether workers should be paid for the time they spend waiting in the security lines they are required to go through after they finish their shifts. Former Amazon warehouse workers in Nevada say it took up to a half hour to go through metal detectors on their way out the door, and that they should have been paid for that time. Amazon argues that its “data shows that employees walk through post shift security screening with little or no wait.” Kevin Drum at Mother Jones makes the obvious but important point: if there’s little or no wait, then why fight so hard against paying for that time?

• Today in Billionaires: The world’s billionaires don’t always graduate from college, but when they do, they graduate most often from the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, or Yale, according to this handy Business Insider chart. Why these schools? An expert weighs in: “it is hard to completely rule out the possibility that this trend is, in part, about money and elite college attendance as a symbol of status for the ruling class.”

• Facebook’s shuttle drivers are trying to unionize, and Kevin Roose at New York says that’s just the beginning. “the Teamsters and other labor groups have never had much of a foothold in Silicon Valley,” he writes. “But that’s about to change. Silicon Valley’s newest labor challenge is coming from the tech underclass—the blue-collar workers who cook, drive, and clean for all those coddled engineers, and who are getting tired of watching the incredible spoils of the tech boom pass them by.”

• Quote of the Day, from a Guardian piece on sexual harassment and discrimination in the restaurant industry: “It’s crude and it’s really primitive, but it’s true: nobody wants to order a drink from an ugly person.”