Court Opinion

ID: 9419658
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:50:49.720904+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:19.845289
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Frankfurter,
concurring.
The Fair Labor Standards Act, 52 Stat. 1060, 29 U. S. C. § 201 et seq., does not prohibit employment at piece-work rates. It merely requires that piece-work earnings be converted to an hourly basis for determining the minimum and overtime requirements of that Act. United States v. Rosenwasser, 323 U. S. 360. Nor does the Act bar an agreement establishing an hourly “regular rate” that does not fall short of the statutory minimum even though it be complicated by a guaranteed weekly lump sum wage adapted to the circumstances of a particular employment, provided it is not a mere artifice unrelated to wage-earning actualities. Walling v. Belo Corp., 316 U. S. 624; Walling v. Helmerich & Payne, 323 U. S. 37. Accordingly, the Fair Labor Standards Act does not preclude a wage agreement whereby piece-rate payments are related, fairly and not evasively, partly to regular hours of work and partly to overtime. Piece rates need not necessarily be so adjusted that they cannot fairly be designed as part of the overtime but must necessarily help “load” the regular hourly wage.
But a properly apportioned overtime function for piece work should be clearly indicated as such in the employment contract. No doubt a law which, while covering piece rates, speaks in terms of hourly rates presents difficulties both for those charged with the law’s enforcement and for those under duty to obey it. But if a wage agreement is to escape the obvious arithmetic way of calculating hourly rates based on piece-work rates, by dividing *434the total earnings by the hours worked, it is not too much to require that the function of piece rates as an overtime factor, if such they be, be clearly formulated. The contract should leave no such dubiety as to the role of the piece rate to the regular hourly rate as the two arrangements before us. It should not be left to courts to work out a hypothetical mathematical interpretation which, if it corresponded with the actual arrangement, could satisfy the statute.
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