Opinion ID: 660190
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Extant Authority.

Text: 37 Neither the statute nor the legislative history directly indicate under what circumstances a court should combine the circulations of related publications when applying the exemption. Moreover, there are no appellate decisions on point. Gateway finds support in two Wage and Hour Division opinion letters interpreting the exemption, while the Secretary relies on a forty-three year old district court opinion, McComb v. Dessau, 89 F.Supp. 295 (S.D.Cal.1950). Unfortunately, none of these authorities gives a reliable answer to this question. 38 The Wage and Hour Division opinion letters are from 1946 and 1965. Although the 1946 opinion letter indicates that a publisher of more than one newspaper may treat each paper separately for the purposes of determining whether the circulation is less than the maximum indicated in Sec. 13(a)(8), it qualifies this statement by stating that where the purported separate publications are properly to be regarded as one and the same newspaper, the total circulation of both papers would have to be considered in determining whether the exemption is applicable. 1948 Wage and Hour Manual (BNA) p 15:328. Thus the 1946 letter merely poses, without answering, the question presented here: what publications are properly regarded as the same newspaper?The 1965 opinion letter is not helpful either. As has been mentioned above, the 1965 letter states that when a company publishes more than one newspaper, each newspaper is tested separately in order to determine whether the circulation is less than four thousand, provided that, in addition to their separate mastheads, the several newspapers carry different local news items. Op. Letter No. 376, [1961-66 Transfer Binder] Lab.L.Rep. (CCH) p 30,988 (June 29, 1965). But what percentage of each paper needs to be local? Is a single local item sufficient? Or must all of the stories be different? The letter does not say, apparently because the Administrator deliberately wanted to leave the standard unclear, preferring instead to decide things on a case by case basis. Id. 7 39 More importantly, the 1965 opinion letter's different local news items standard seems to have been ignored in an opinion letter issued just four years later. A 1969 Wage and Hour Division opinion letter states that a publisher of a newspaper with a circulation of less than four thousand would not be exempt under Sec. 13(a)(8) because it printed a military newspaper with a circulation of more than four thousand. Op. Letter No. 973 [1676-72 Transfer Binder] Lab.L.Rep. (CCH) p 30,511 (March 27, 1969). 8 Despite the fact that the publisher did no more than handle the advertising and printing of the military newspaper and that only his printing employees worked on both papers, the administrator thought that the publisher could not have the circulation of the two papers counted separately for purposes of the exemption. Id. at p 30,512. The Wage and Hour Division said nothing about the different local news items standard. 40 We do not cite the 1969 opinion letter because its reasoning is more persuasive than the 1965 letter. Rather, the 1969 opinion letter merely illustrates the inconsistency and vagueness of the agency interpretations of this exemption. Normally we must give considerable weight to agency interpretations expressed in opinion letters. Pension Guaranty Corp. v. LTV Corp., 496 U.S. 633, 646, 110 S.Ct. 2668, 2676, 110 L.Ed.2d 579 (1990) (Chevron deference appropriate for opinion letters); see also, Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U.S. 837, 842-43, 104 S.Ct. 2778, 2781-82, 81 L.Ed.2d 694 (1984); Skidmore v. Swift & Co., 323 U.S. 134, 140, 65 S.Ct. 161, 164, 89 L.Ed. 124 (1944). Such weight need not be given, however, when the interpretations are, like these, inconsistent, not contemporaneous to the enactment of the statute, and stale (the most recent one in this case being twenty-four years old). See Barnett v. Weinberger, 818 F.2d 953, 961-62, nn. 73 and 74 (D.C.Cir.1987) (marshalling the case law discussing the proposition that the prestige of a statutory construction by an agency depends crucially upon whether it was promulgated contemporaneously with enactment of the statute and has been adhered to consistently over time). See also Lynn Martin v. Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission, 499 U.S. 144, 111 S.Ct. 1171, 113 L.Ed.2d 117 (1991) (stating that the consistency of application of interpretations bears on the reasonableness of the agency's position under Chevron ); Batterton v. Francis, 432 U.S. 416, 425 n. 9, 97 S.Ct. 2399, 2405 n. 9, 53 L.Ed.2d 448 (1977) (explaining that [v]arying degrees of deference are accorded to administrative interpretations, based on such factors as the timing and consistency of the agency's position, and the nature of its expertise.). 9 41 The Secretary submits that we ought to follow the analysis in the Dessau case. In Dessau, the defendants published four weekly newspapers. 89 F.Supp. at 296. All of the writing, editorial and printing work was done from the same location by the same employees. Id. at 297-98. Each paper had a different masthead, and circulated among different groups of subscribers. Id. Otherwise, the papers were virtually identical. The court held that where a publisher published four papers from the same location, had the same employees working on each of them, made no distinction respecting payroll among the papers, and where the other papers had no real distinct corporate or business identity, the circulation of all four should be combined in determining whether the small newspaper exemption applied. Id. 42 Although Dessau is apparently the only case specifically discussing the question of when aggregation of the circulation of a publisher's different papers is appropriate, we believe that it is distinguishable. Unlike the papers in Dessau, the papers in the Gateway chain clearly have different stories, advertisements and editorial oversight. And although much of the content and operation of the Gateway papers is centralized, much of it is not. In addition, Dessau does not provide a clear framework for analyzing the question of when circulations should be aggregated. The two important facts listed in Dessau that apply to the Gateway newspapers--a lack of a separate corporate identity and the existence of a unitary employer/employee relationship--suggest something like a unitary business operations analysis. But it is not clear how such an analysis fits with the interpretation of the Wage and Hour Division that a single publisher can print more than one newspaper and still fall within the scope of the exemption. 10 We assume that at least some degree of centralization of business operations can occur without automatically requiring that the circulation of the different publications be aggregated. Unfortunately, Dessau does not indicate how much centralization is acceptable under the exemption, in part because it does not ground its analysis in the FLSA statutory scheme. 43 The Secretary attempts to overcome Dessau's shortcomings by combining Dessau with the Wage and Hour Division opinion letters and proposing a two part test: (1) whether the newspapers are properly regarded as one and the same based on their integrated operations, and (2) whether the newspapers contain different news items. [Secretary's Brief at 21]. Since this test is an interpretation created for purposes of this litigation, however, it is not entitled to deference. Bowen v. Georgetown University Hospital, 488 U.S. 204, 212, 109 S.Ct. 468, 473-74, 102 L.Ed.2d 493 (1988). Absent deference, the test is unconvincing, for it draws an artificial line between the operations of the newspapers and their contents, and it essentially makes the unified business operation of a publisher sufficient to remove all of the publisher's publications from the scope of the exemption. Under such an approach, no publisher of more than a single paper who takes advantage of some economies of scale in operating the papers would have the circulations of the papers counted separately for purposes of applying the exemption. 44 Having determined that none of the authorities cited by the parties specifically resolves whether the circulation of the different Gateway papers ought to be combined, we look for guidance to the history of the exemption and the general purposes of the FLSA. We also keep in mind that, because the FLSA is a remedial statute, the Supreme Court has long held that exemptions from the FLSA are to be narrowly construed against the employer. Arnold v. Ben Kanowsky, Inc., 361 U.S. 388, 392, 80 S.Ct. 453, 456, 4 L.Ed.2d 393 (1960). 11 As we explain below, we conclude that the FLSA's concept of enterprise provides the best analogy for determining to what extent a court should aggregate the circulation of different publications when applying the exemption. 45