Court Opinion

ID: 9637740
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 15:17:46.267902+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:09:59.902554
License: Public Domain

HUTCHESON, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
I am wholly unable to see how our holding, that appellants, the employees of the Silas Mason Company, were within the coverage of the Fair Labor Standards Act, could possibly be “by judicial fiat, to fasten shackles on the nation’s feet while it marches to war, nor otherwise to hinder the Government in the exercise of the sovereign function of providing for the common defense.” Standing solitary and alone among my brethren, I hereby disclaim for my brief dissent any purpose to do so.
As I read and understand the Fair Labor Standards Act, it was not enacted to, it does not, fasten shackles on the feet of any. Rather it was enacted to strike from the feet of those who toil the shackles of substandard wages. Sec. 203 — Definitions —described “employer” and “employee,” “commerce” and “goods” in the widest terms. It does, indeed, exclude from the definition of “employer” the United States, the states or political subdivisions of the states. But there is nothing in it which excludes from the definition “employer” independent contractors producing goods under contract with the United States. Because of its fundamentally remedial purpose and the broad language it uses, the act should be, it generally has been, construed to give the widest coverage its language will permit.
A study of the record in this case leaves me in no doubt: that the appellants were not employees of the United States; that, on the contrary, they were employees of an independent contractor working under contract with the United States; that the munitions they were producing were “goods” within the definition of goods as used in the act; and that, unless it can be said that these goods were not being “pro*1020duced for commerce” within the act’s definitions, appellants cannot justly be denied the coverage they seek.
As the act defines it, “ 'Commerce’ means trade, commerce, transportation, transmission, or communication among the several States or from any State to any place outside thereof.” 29 U.S.C.A. § 203(b). I ask upon what permissible theory can it be claimed that appellants are not covered here, when it is conceded that had they been working for a private plant which made munitions for sale and delivery to the United States for war, they would have been. The munitions in both cases would be for purposes of war and not of ordinary trade, but in both cases they would have been produced for transportation from a state to a place outside thereof.
If the United States, as the employer, had manufactured these munitions, certainly appellants would have no standing to invoke the Fair Labor Standards Act, for the very definition of employer excludes the United States. Here the whole elaborate system was designed and operated so that the United States should not be the employer. This being so beyond question, I find myself wholly unable to agree that employees of Silas Mason Company are not under the act merely because instead of producing ships and clothes and uniforms for use of the armed forces, they were producing munitions.
The briefs of the parties and the briefs filed amicus curiae by the Administrator of the Wage and Hour Division have brought forward and discussed all of the applicable decisions. It will advantage no one for me to pile Pelion upon Ossa in further citing and discussing them. It will be sufficient for me to say that I find myself in complete agreement with the views expressed in Bell v. Porter, 7 Cir., 159 F.2d 117, and that nothing in this case has caused me to withdraw in the slightest from the pronouncements in the opinion of this court in Atlantic Company v. Walling, 5 Cir., 131 F.2d 518. Standing then not wrapped in the solitude of my own originality but on the solid ground those opinions afford, I can see, no reason for isolating appellants from the general mass of employees in war plants and, because they produced munitions, excluding them from ■the benefits and protection of the Fair Labor Standards Act. I think the judgment should be reversed. I respectfully dissent from its affirmance.