Court Opinion

ID: 9470686
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 03:13:10.932122+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:42:03.095335
License: Public Domain

RANDALL, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
Although I fully agree with the majority’s conclusion that a highly skilled and well paid company pilot such as Paul “do[es] not need the protection of overtime wage rates,” I am unable to discover anywhere in this case anything that would enable us to determine whether knowledge of the type that Paul theoretically has, by virtue of his certificates, is “customarily acquired by a prolonged course of specialized intellectual instruction and study.” 29 C.F.R. § 541.-302(d) (emphasis added). I therefore respectfully dissent.
Since an employer must carry the burden of proving that an exemption applies, and since (as the majority concedes) PETCO has presented no evidence on the “customarily acquired” question, the majority has had to go to considerable lengths to fill in the gaps in the Company’s proof. What the majority has done is to show what a pilot with Paul’s FAA certificates must know to pass the requisite examinations; from the sophistication and complexity of that knowledge, the majority infers that it must necessarily be “customarily acquired by a prolonged course of specialized intellectual instruction and study.” If it were possible validly to draw this inference simply from the Code of Federal Regulations and the various test guides published by the FAA, the Wage and Hour Division would have done so by now. It has not. The Division has been willing for some years, as the majority points out, to take a “no action” position with respect to certain highly paid pilots, but it has never exempted those pilots. Indeed, it has consistently declined to do so. A “no action” letter from an enforcement agency is simply not the same thing as a general exemption. The result of today’s decision, however, will be to establish just such a general exemption.
The record in this case is deficient. We have no idea how most commercial, instrument-rated pilots acquire their training; nor do we know how Paul acquired his. I would therefore reverse.