Charles E. Doll, Jr.
interviewed by Historical Commission member Paul J. Sonnenberg on March 6, 1990
CHARLES E. DOLL, JR., POTTERY MANAGER, DISCUSSING THE U.S. SUPREME COURT PORTAL-TO-PORTAL PAY CASE IN WHICH THE POTTERY WAS A DEFENDANT:
Well, we had that Portal-to-Portal lawsuit, which was a setback to the company. We had to fight that for almost six years, through the court system, up to the Supreme Court, in order to win the case. I won't go into details about it here, it takes too long, it's too complicated. A great many people aren't interested in it. But the Mount Clemens Pottery Company was sued, on the basis of people not being paid for the amount of time that they worked.
INTERVIEWER: Well, what does "portal-to-portal" mean? Didn't they want to be paid from the time they left home til they got to the plant, or...
CHARLES DOLL: No, they wanted to be paid from the time they walked in the front door, until the time they walked out the front door. Now, we had a piecework operation, and, of course, in order to satisfy the demands and requirements of the Wage/Hour Act, we had to compute that money that they earned at piecework rates. We had to compute that into an hourly rate for each employee, so that he could be paid time-and-a-half for overtime. Which we successfully did, and which the Wage/Hour Division approved, but these people were looking for a chance to unionize the pottery, and we had resisted their efforts. They felt that they had a selling point there, that if they could persuade the government that we weren't paying these people from the time they came to work in the morning til the time they left in the evening, that they'd get a lot of money paid that they had coming that we hadn't paid them. We only paid them for the time they worked, which showed on the time clock. But this principle they were trying to apply was, the man walks through the front door of the plant in the morning and he goes and hangs up his coat and he puts his lunchbox away and he sits around and he talks to his buddies, visits with the girls, and then a couple minutes before the whistle is ready to blow he goes and turns on his light and puts on his gloves and decides it's about time to go to work. They wanted to be paid for all that time because we'd let 'em punch in fourteen minutes before the hour and they didn't have to punch out at fourteen minutes after the hour.
So that was the basis on which this "portal-to-portal" lawsuit was started. And the company, of course, defended itself, and went through the court system, both the district court in Detroit and the appeals court in Cincinnati, and then finally the Supreme Court. And finally, the Congress wrote an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act, in which they outlawed portal-to-portal as a principle, except in industries like the coal mines, and the slaughterhouses, and places where they have to get ready to go to work. Because getting ready is part of the operation, and cleaning up after is part of the operation. Well, we went through that from about 1941 til 1946, before it was all settled, meantime we kept production going at the pottery and after the war expanded production.