Court Opinion

ID: 9473016
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 04:17:16.588745+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:43:16.700660
License: Public Domain

E. GRADY JOLLY,
dissenting:
Case by case, plaintiff by plaintiff, we dilute the requirements to meet seaman status.
It is said here that the plaintiff is “permanently” attached to the FALCON. Yet only on intermittent occasions did it become necessary for the plaintiff to board any vessel, much less the specific vessel FALCON, in order to perform his work. Indeed, the facts show that the plaintiff’s employer contracted with Chevron to provide maintenance and repair only on fixed platforms. His “attachment” to a vessel, when it briefly occurred, did not even relate to the amount of time necessary to complete a project, but rather related to the number of days of his particular work hitch. At the end of his several-day work hitch, he almost always said his goodbyes to whatever vessel he left, if any, because he was not likely to return since his new assignment was usually to another platform. In such new assignment, it was very probable that no barge, much less the FALCON, awaited him because seventy to eighty percent of his work was performed on platforms large enough not to require a vessel to provide the space for work. The majority seems to ignore this fact by failing to evaluate the nature and quality of the plaintiff’s work assignment over the course of his employment; rather, the majority concludes that he is “permanently attached” by evaluating his work assignment on only one of many work hitches. And so we find that the plaintiff’s eight-day association with the FALCON is “permanent.” Someone has been away from a dictionary too long.
*137Second, it is said by the majority that the plaintiff “contributed to the mission of the FALCON” — to be sure, any contention to the contrary is called “far-fetched.” So how is the mission defined: the mission of the vessel, the opinion states, was to provide work space for the plaintiff and to transport materials between the caisson and the barge. Yet the plaintiff, as a welder’s helper, clearly had no responsibilities for transporting materials from the caisson to the FALCON; nor did he have any responsibilities whatsoever in the operation of the vessel. The plaintiff was simply to work in the space provided by the vessel. Thus the mission of the vessel was to provide work space for the plaintiff — nothing more — and the plaintiff did nothing to provide space for himself or anyone else, yet he contributed to that already-completed mission of providing space by working in the space provided. I am afraid I do not understand.
Before today, I had never thought that paying passengers aboard a cruise ship “contributed to the mission of the vessel” by occupying the space they had bought for a two-week cruise. Somehow I had never thought that a novelist who writes aboard a cruise vessel during his two-week voyage is a Jones Act seaman. But he may be as “permanently assigned” as Jethro Barrett is here, and he is working in the space provided and thus contributing to the “mission” of the vessel as much as Jethro Barrett is here.
Because I do riot ascribe to the word “permanence” the meaning the majority gives it, and because I do not follow the reasoning that the plaintiff contributed to the mission of the FALCON, and because I think it is regrettable to stretch words and logic beyond their reasonable ductility in the name of “liberal construction,” I respectfully dissent.