Court Opinion

ID: 9469368
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:38:30.255423+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:41:21.081114
License: Public Domain

ALDRICH, Senior Circuit Judge
(concurring in result).
While I accept the result I cannot agree with the opinion in this case, which seems to rest upon a necessary function test which I view as no test at all. Everyone in a shipyard is necessary to its successful operation, or he or she would not be there. Without a gatekeeper to exclude undesirables and a nightwatchman to discover fire or marauders, or a janitor to repair the toilets, there might be serious interruption in business. And if the test is whether the shipbuilding process requires services that “mesh with overall construction schedules,” the president’s secretary who orders the raw material, and the inventory checker who discovers it has not arrived, are sine qua nons. Had Congress intended a necessary function test it would have been abundantly easy to say “employees of a steve-dorer, shipbuilder and ship-repairer” and be done with it. It did not.
In the present circumstance I turn to the most recent advice from the Court, P. C. Pfeiffer Co. v. Ford, 1979, 444 U.S. 69, 100 S.Ct. 328, 62 L.Ed.2d 225: A “trucker carrying cotton to Galveston [is not] engaged in maritime employment even though he is working on the marine situs.” Id., at 83, 100 S.Ct. at 338. Maritime employment, in other words, relates to the nature of the work as well as the situs. Thus in White v. Newport News Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Co., 4 Cir., 1980, 633 F.2d 1070, cited by the court, the court said, at 1074,
“White’s regular functions of affixing the color code and etching to the individual pieces of pipe for the purpose of identifying their respective grades to the ship fabricators effected a physical change to *41each piece of pipe and gave each an added characteristic essential to identify it by grade for its proper application and use by the fabricators in the construction by them of ships at the shipyard. Hence, White’s performance of those functions on the pipe were the first steps taken physically to alter that pipe for its use in ship construction, and his doing so thus constituted an ‘integral part’ and necessary ‘ingredient’ of shipbuilding and also caused him to be ‘directly involved’ therein, as did his occasional cutting of pipe for ship construction.”
This action marked a discernible point of shipbuilding involvement, causing situs to acquire an additional qualification.
This distinction seems supported by P. C. Pfeiffer Co. v. Ford, ante, but even more by Northeast Marine Terminal Co. v. Caputo, 1977, 432 U.S. 249, 97 S.Ct. 2348, 53 L.Ed.2d 320. There the Court stated that it was “clear that persons who are on the situs but are not engaged in the overall process of loading and unloading vessels[*] are not covered. ... Also excluded are employees who perform purely clerical tasks and are not engaged in the handling of cargo.” (Viz., the longshoreman’s primary job). Yet if we are applying simply a necessary function test, checking clerks must be essential to the vessel’s unloading.
Ford teaches us that the employee trucker who brings the material into the yard is not “engaged in maritime employment even though he is working on the marine situs,” and I would say the same as to an employee who completes its journey by unloading it, necessary though that be. For this I would not qualify the claimant. On the other hand, I am content to say that he is covered because the shipbuilding process, in which he participated, includes the movement from storage to the machine shop.

 See also, id., page 266 n.27, 97 S.Ct. 2358 n.27, “engaged in ... building a vessel.”