Court Opinion

ID: 9673126
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 04:06:47.915558+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:16:20.332297
License: Public Domain

Caporale, 1,
dissenting.
I disagree. The majority rests its decision of first impression under the Nebraska Fair Employment Practice Act, Neb. Rev. Stat. §§ 48-1101 through 48-1126 (Reissue 1993), on ill-reasoned federal cases because it considers them to be “more consistent with the remedial purpose of the statute.” This, I regretfully suggest, begs the question of what the Nebraska Legislature sought to remedy.
The express purpose of our act is to “foster the employment of all employable persons ... on the basis of merit regardless of their race, color, religion, sex, disability, or national origin and to safeguard their right to obtain and hold employment without discrimination ....”§ 48-1101. To accomplish that purpose, and apparently more, the act prohibits “an employer” from engaging in certain discriminatory acts based upon “race, color, religion, sex, disability, marital status, or national origin.” *126(Emphasis supplied.) § 48-1104. It defines employer, in pertinent part, as one “engaged in an industry who has fifteen or more employees for each working day in each of twenty or more calendar weeks in the current or preceding calendar year.” § 48-1102(2).
Thus, for whatever reason our Legislature deemed good and sufficient, the act does not undertake to end all employment discrimination, but merely to end such discrimination by those who are “engaged in an industry” and employ at least 15 workers “each working day.” Leaving aside the question of what an industry might be, the majority, by counting all who are on the payroll on a given day irrespective of whether they are required to work that day, effectively reads the phrase “each working day” out of the statute and substitutes in its place and stead the phrase “on its payroll.” As a result, § 48-1102(2) now operates as if it defined employer not as it does, but as one “engaged in an industry who has fifteen or more employees on its payroll in each of twenty or more calendar weeks in the current or preceding calendar year.” I respectfully suggest that if that was what the Legislature had meant, it was fully capable of having said so.
Except when dealing with an ambiguous statute, Seevers v. Potter, 248 Neb. 621, 537 N.W.2d 505 (1995), or a constitutionally suspect one, State ex rel. Grape v. Zach, 247 Neb. 29, 524 N.W.2d 788 (1994), our task is not to improve legislative language, but to apply it as written. See Garza v. City of Omaha, 215 Neb. 714, 340 N.W.2d 409 (1983) (court not permitted to read words into statute which are not there). See, also, Nebraska Life & Health Ins. Guar. Assn. v. Dobias, 247 Neb. 900, 531 N.W.2d 217 (1995); Major Liquors, Inc. v. City of Omaha, 188 Neb. 628, 198 N.W.2d 483 (1972) (courts do not substitute their social and economic beliefs for judgment of legislative bodies).
Having come to the conclusion that Bluff’s Vision Clinic, P.C., does not itself employ the requisite number of workers, I must consider an issue the majority found unnecessary to reach, namely, whether, as Susan Krzyzanowski posits, the eye-care operations of Bluff’s Vision, a professional corporation, are so interrelated with the food catering operations of The Meat Shoppe, Inc., a business corporation, that the employees of the latter must be considered to be the employees of the former as *127well. In this regard, both Bluff’s Vision and Krzyzanowski cite us to Baker v. Stuart Broadcasting Co., 560 F.2d 389 (8th Cir. 1977), which holds that there are circumstances whereunder it is appropriate to treat two allegedly separate business enterprises as a single entity for the purpose of determining whether there exists the requisite number of workers to bring one of the entities under the definition of “employers” for the purposes of title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. § 2000e et seq. (1994). According to Baker, the factors to consider in making such a determination include the interrelation of the operations, the existence of common management, the existence of centralized controls, and the existence of common ownership or financial control. While Krzyzanowski urges that the requisite factors exist here, Bluff’s Vision predictably argues otherwise.
I need not, and therefore do not, consider whether I accept the existence of these factors as an adequate basis upon which to pierce the corporate veil in cases of this type, for even if that were to prove to be the situation, the Baker factors are not present in this case.
The evidence demonstrates only that the president of one entity is also the president of the other; that he is a 50-percent shareholder of Bluff’s Vision and, together with his wife, a 50-percent shareholder of Meat Shoppe; that he is one of two members of the board of directors of Bluff’s Vision; and that he and his wife comprise two of the four members of the board of directors of Meat Shoppe. While it is true that the articles of incorporation and bylaws of Meat Shoppe give general control over its affairs to its board of directors and president, those circumstances do not, in and of themselves, establish that there is sufficient common ownership or financial control to warrant treating one entity as the alter ego of the other. Neither is there any evidence that the diverse business operations of the two entities are in any way interrelated, or that there is any centralized control of labor relations.
Accordingly, I would reverse the judgment of the Nebraska Court of Appeals and remand the cause thereto with the direction that it affirm the judgment of the district court.