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What is a work day? When it passed the Wages & Hours Act in 1938, Congress neglected to say. So the Supreme Court last June did the job for Congress--and thereby made U.S: industry liable for enormous sums in back pay, portal-to-portal (TIME, Dec. 16).

By last week, labor unions had filed suits demanding the whopping sum of $1,300,000,000. The suits came so fast that newspapers ran lists of companies sued in long columns, like disaster victims--which they well might be. The unions sued Bethlehem Steel for $200,000,000, Curtis-Wright for $29,000,000, National Biscuit Co. for $50,000,000, and prepared to sue the Ford Motor Co. for $300,000,000. In all, the total of suits might reach a stratospheric $6 billion.

Little Fire. It had all started in the little-noticed 5-to-2 decision of the Supreme Court in the case of Michigan's Mt. Clemens Pottery Co. Edward Lamb, who practices law in Toledo as a hobby, had represented 1,200 unionized pottery employes in a simple suit for back overtime pay (see LETTERS). They had asked to be paid for the 14 minutes they spent on company property before their paid shifts began and after they ended, a total of up to 56 minutes a day. Detroit's Federal Judge Frank A. Picard, able and conscientious, thought the question was not so simple. He appointed a special master to find out what the workers did.

The master decided that it was not "work" for men to stand in line to punch the time clock, walk to their benches, don overalls, grease their arms, sharpen tools. Even if they started work before the whistle blew, the master argued, it should not count, because sometimes they loafed afterward or quit early.

Picard, who was a trapeze artist in the family circus as a boy, walked a legal high wire. He decided that punching the clock and walking to the bench were not "work," but that if a man worked before the whistle, he must be paid for it. That gave the union men $2,415.74.

Holocaust. The company might have paid and let the question drop. But it appealed, and won in the Circuit Court. Then Lamb appealed to the Supreme Court, and won. But he won this time on an entirely different ground--an issue that he had never raised. In a decision handed down by Justice Frank Murphy, the Court found that Judge Picard was wrong to ignore walking time and time spent preparing for work.

Previous rulings of the court in 1944 and 1945, which had applied to "portal-to-portal" pay for miners alone, were now applied to workers in all industries. For all the time spent on company property--except for insignificant amounts--a worker must be paid.

But the way in which unions were swinging this legal club brought a cry of alarm last week from Judge Picard and even from Lawyer Lamb. Said Picard, who obviously thought many of the union suits were on flimsy ground: "There is no reason for this hysteria causing sleepless nights for some enterprises."

Said Lawyer Lamb: "It is unwise to specify these fabulous and reckless sums. They . . . may stir Congress to adopt restrictive legislation."

But there seemed to be little that Congress could do. A retroactive law outlawing suits already filed would probably be unconstitutional, but bills were being readied to outlaw such suits in the future. Barring a new ruling by the Supreme Court, the chief hope for industry was that district judges, who must decide on what back pay workers have coming, would 1) throw out some of the suits and 2) fix reasonable amounts in the rest. Whatever the final bill, much of it would be paid by the U.S. Treasury, because business could apply losses in these suits against taxes. The Government, business and labor could all lose in the long run.

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