Court Opinion

ID: 9637811
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 15:22:06.393474+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:10:00.832725
License: Public Domain

WOODROUGH, Circuit Judge
(concurring).
I concur in the decision herein, but I think the powers vested in the district courts by the Fair Labor Standards Act to restrain violations of its provisions include the power to enter mandatory injunctions at the instance of the Administrator requiring employers to pay up any deficiencies they are shown to be unlawfully withholding from employees in violation of the Act at the time of the entry of decree against the employer. The Act imposes upon the employers the duty to pay the specified minimum wage, and when they withhold a part of the specified amount and pay less than the law requires they violate the law. The violation continues as long as they continue the withholding and refusal to pay according to law. Without a mandatory provision requiring the employer to perform the duty and to comply with the law by paying the retained deficiency, an injunction directed only to the future does not restrain the employer’s violations of the Act or protect the public interest as intended by Congress. The Act nowhere limits the courts to restraining only the future threatened holding back of parts of the prescribed minimum wage. It deals with and prescribes what employers must pay from and after the date fixed in the Act, and the power conferred on the courts is to restrain the refusals to pay which are violations of the Act. Mandatory injunction tends to effect compliance with the Act and is the traditional “restraint of violation” plainly within the Act’s intendment. That the Act also accords remedies to private individuals for their private damage from the violations is immaterial. As to such individual employees on whom the Act confers a right of action for deficiency in wages, there can be no doubt that the remedies provided for them by the Act are exclusive and controlling in any suits they bring. It creates their private right and defines and limits it. But the Administrator properly and exclusively represents the public interest. In that interest he invokes the power vested in the courts to compel obedience to the law by injunc-tional process. I see no good reason why the courts should not award him their mandatory injunctional order on proof of present unlawful withholding of minimum wages from those to whom the law says they must be paid, as well as an injunction against violations threatened to be committed in the future.