Court Opinion

ID: 9636799
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 14:43:25.303223+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:09:49.560375
License: Public Domain

SIBLEY, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
There is nothing in the conclusions of law of the district judge to warrant the inference that he had an erroneous view of the law. He made very clear findings of fact, well warranted by the uncontradicted evidence, and our question is whether those facts require a finding that Bradford, Walker, and Hobbs were each employees of the taxpayer, who were producers, pack-n ers and marketers of citrus fruits in Orange County, Florida, in 1937, 1938 and 1939.
They were not hired by the day, week or month, and at no fixed wage. In the citrus fruit business since 1928 it has been the custom at the beginning of the packing season, which lasts only three or four months, to receive bids from persons desiring to contract for the season to construct the boxes, which are shipped to a packing house knocked down, and to label and load them into cars after they are packed, for so much per hundred boxes. This custom antedated the social security laws, and was not an effort to circumvent them. Bradford, Walker and Hobbs were the low bidders at taxpayers’ packing house, and received contracts for all or a part of these jobs in the above named shipping seasons. They could not by themselves execute the work each had contracted for, but each hired other men to aid in the work or to do it all, as they desired, the taxpayers having nothing to do with the hiring, control or discharge of them, and paying them no wages and •owing them none. When eight or more were used by a contractor, he recognized that he was an employer under the social security laws and paid his and their social security taxes accordingly. The packing house had no legal relation to these workmen except, being the owner of the portion of the premises assigned for doing this work, it was bound to see that the premises were reasonably safe. Bradford, Walker, and Hobbs paid the wages of their several workmen, less their taxes, out of what they received in the weekly settlements for boxes made or loaded under their respective contracts; they paid their own taxes, and what was left was the season’s profit.
The taxes in dispute, however, were assessed on all that was paid Bradford, Walker and Hobbs, although the greater part of it went to their workmen and some of it went for social security taxes due by Bradford, Walker, and Hobbs as being themselves employers. It seems to me unjust and self-contradictory to say these three men are employees and what is paid them is taxable wages, and at the same time to say they are employers and as such owe taxes on the greater part of what was paid them. This fact of their being bona fide employers of others on their own account and not as agents of the plaintiffs here is what distinguishes this case from those recently decided by the Supreme Court.
It is true that they did not offer to serve others after they had contracted for the season. That would be true of any contractor so long as a job lasted which took all his time. But they worked for others and' farmed between packing seasons. They used the premises and tools and materials of the taxpayers in executing the contracts, but so they might have done if they had contracted to build houses instead of boxes. The United States during the war furnished premises, tools, and materials to build ships at so much per ship, with no possibility of loss to the builder, but the idea that the builder was not an independent contractor we did not approve. St. Johns River Shipbuilding Co. v. Adams et al., 164 F.2d 1012. While the contractors here in question were not capitalists, a contract for 400,000 boxes, at $1.35 per hundred as paid Hobbs the last season, would come to $5,400, a very substantial sum. They were free men and entitled to work as contractors and employers of others if they *46desired. Nobody treated them as mere employees. The Supreme Court of Florida held Hobbs was not such in Gentile Bros. Co. v. Florida Industrial Commission, 151 Fla. 857, 10 So.2d 568, under a statute modeled on the federal Act. These taxpayers deducted nothing for social security taxes from what was paid them; and the United States collected such taxes from them as employers, including deductions from wages due their respective workmen. I think that Bradford, Walker and Hobbs not only could be found to be independent contractors, but that they ought to be.