Court Opinion

ID: 9481663
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 08:27:51.348394+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:48:29.903940
License: Public Domain

JERRE S. WILLIAMS, Circuit Judge,
with whom JOHNSON, Circuit Judge, joins, dissenting:
I dissent from the decision of the en banc court in this case. The posture in which the case is presented to us and the use of irrelevant authority reveals that the conclusion on the critical issue is in error. The facts as stated in the opinion for the Court are accurate insofar as they go. They need supplementation by way of emphasis. The panel opinion and this dissent are grounded wholly on the circumstance which must be accepted as true that for a period of approximately eleven months from February 1982 until January 1983, employee Bright’s life was significantly circumscribed by his employer without ' compensation. There was no relief by way of other employees sharing the duties so that Bright would have periods of being free from the restrictions. There were no free weekends, there was no vacation, there were no free days or nights. This is the core issue in the case.
Under these circumstances, the Court abandons its proper role by affirming a summary judgment that Bright was not working during any of the time periods he was stringently limited in his activities by the employer but was not required to be on the premises. The Supreme Court established the authority which controls this case in the two landmark cases of Armour & Co. v. Wantock, 323 U.S. 126, 65 S.Ct. 165, 89 L.Ed. 118 (1944), and Skidmore v. Swift & Co., 323 U.S. 134, 65 S.Ct. 161, 89 L.Ed. 124 (1944). When there is any likelihood that the restrictions resulting from on-call time can amount to work time “[wjhether in a concrete case such time falls within or without the Act is a question of fact to be resolved by appropriate findings of the trial court.” Skidmore, 323 U.S. at 136-37, 65 S.Ct. at 163 (emphasis added).
Further, the court or the jury in making the determination as to whether such time is work time is not required to find all or nothing — that the full 16 hours away from the plant and 24 hours on weekends is or is not work time. Skidmore and Armour recognized that time spent typically in sleeping, eating, and normal recreation, could properly be found not to be work time under such circumstances. The critical point is that the unique fact in this case, the failure of the employer to provide any relief 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for the entire 11 month period raises a fact issue as to the extent of work time.
I do not go into detail to comment upon the cases discussed and treated as controlling by the majority opinion of the en banc court. None of them control. Every single one of them, without exception, involves a situation where the employer had more than one employee sharing the oppressive schedule or there was some other means of “covering the employee” so that the employee was not committed and under serious limitations without respite over a substantial period of timé. These cases are discussed and distinguished in detail'in the panel opinion, Bright v. Houston Northwest Medical Center Survivor, Inc., 888 F.2d 1059, 1062-1064 (5th Cir.1989).
The nearest case to the facts of this case has to do with the employee Pilkenton, who was on a schedule with virtually the identical restrictions as. Bright. Pilkenton v. Appalachian Regional Hosps., Inc., 336 F.Supp. 334 (W.D.Va.1971). But in Pilken-ton another employee shared the on-call duty so that each employee was freed of the duty and personal limitations for half of his or her overall time. Thus, the employees were not being held on a permanent 20 minute leash.
*680At the end, the opinion for the Court falls back, as it must, upon the proposition that Bright was in the same situation as someone holding a job in a remote part of Alaska where, after an eight hour day, the use of his or her own time obviously is limited. This reliance is wholly foreign to the thrust of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Admittedly, there are jobs which because of location are in isolated areas. That is in the nature of the jobs. But the isolation is not the result of an employer’s direction requiring employee on-call availability during off-duty hours. The employer has nothing to do with the restricted recreational and living accommodations in an isolated job. That is not an on-call situation at all. In contrast, here it is the employer who is enforcing a unique restriction upon a particular employee as part of the particular on-call work assignment. This is of the essence of the thrust of potential work time under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
This distinction can be seen more clearly if in an extreme case the employer directed a particular employee permanently to remain behind on the hospital campus for an hour each day after the workshift was over in case some problem arose about the changeover from one shift to another. The employee would be free to read a book, watch television, walk around the grounds, but would be required to remain on the grounds for an hour in case the employee was needed. It would be exceedingly difficult to hold that that particular hour was not work time. It would be an additional on-call restriction for the benefit of the employer placed upon the employee for an extra hour every day but without compensation.
Bright’s case, of course, is not that extreme in its restriction. But it is not a remote location case caused by the nature of the work applicable to all jobs. It is an on-call isolation case caused by the employer’s own orders defining the particular work assignment. Thus, we are left, as the panel opinion said, with the circumstance in which Bright “was not far removed from a prisoner serving a sentence under slightly relaxed house arrest terms. He never could go to downtown Houston, he never could go to Galveston and see the ocean. He never could go to a baseball or football game in the Astrodome. An out of town event, even a visit to relatives or friends in San Antonio or Austin, was totally out of the question.” Bright, 888 F.2d at 1064. Further, the employer had a relatively simple and humane means of avoiding this restriction which was akin to and rather close to house arrest. The remedy is found in every single one of the cases cited by the majority opinion and relied upon by the majority opinion. The employer could have set up a system under which this onerous restrictive duty could be shared or certain periods of relief could be afforded.
Finally, the opinion for the Court asserts that all overtime issues under the statute must be based upon a week by week analysis. We have said this in a case where it is relevant, but there are instances where the courts have recognized that the week by week test is not adequate. While the FLSA calls for the calculation of the payment of overtime on a weekly basis, it does not require that each individual week be a wholly separate entity in determining whether an employee is working or not.
In Allen v. Atlantic Richfield Co., 724 F.2d 1131 (5th Cir.1981) (cited in the en banc opinion), we considered a case in which security personnel because of a strike were required to remain on the grounds of the industrial establishment for 24 hours every day for a period of what was apparently the first few weeks of an eleven week strike. Later, arrangements were made during the strike to rotate the 24 hour duty. The jury found that the security employees were not working during this period when they were off duty although they were required to remain at the plant. We upheld the jury verdict.
We can draw two authoritative conclusions from our decision in this case. First, the opinion makes no reference to a week by week limitation but instead assumed that the entire time during which the 24 hour requirement was in effect was relevant to the work time issue. Second, the case shows that we can and should trust *681juries in these eases to deny bonanzas to unfounded claims of extra work. The jury found no additional work time in that relatively short period of a few weeks involved in Allen.
Bright may not be able to prove to a jury that he was entitled to any additional work time credit. Further, the restrictions may not have been as stringent as the record which we must now accept indicates. But I dissent because this is not a case for summary judgment. A trial is necessary to assess the facts of this case. As the Supreme Court held in Skidmore, the determination of whether on-call time falls under the FLSA' is highly fact-specific. There is a total absence of any authority which goes even close to the extreme presented to us as to the permanent, unrelenting, restrictions placed upon Bright’s time by his employer. Thus, it was error to affirm the summary judgment of the district court. Bright is entitled to a jury trial on the facts presented to us. The well-established requirement of the Fair Labor Standards Act that on-call time can constitute work time requires this result and prompts this dissent.