Court Opinion

ID: 9419675
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:50:59.928455+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:19.877587
License: Public Domain

Mr. Chief Justice Stone,
dissenting.
No doubt there are philosophers who would argue, what is implicit in the decision now rendered, that in a complex modern society there is such interdependence of its members that the activities of most of them are necessary to the activities of most others. But I think that Congress did not make that philosophy the basis of the coverage of the Fair Labor Standards Act. It did not, by a “house-that-Jack-built” chain of causation, bring within the sweep of the statute the ultimate causa causarum which result in the production of goods for commerce. Instead it defined production as a physical process. It said in § 3 (j) “ ‘Produced’ means produced, manufactured, mined, handled, or in any other manner worked on” and declared that those who participate in any of these processes “or in any process or occupation necessary to” them are engaged in production and subject to the Act.
In Kirschbaum Co. v. Walling, 316 U. S. 517, after pointing out that Congress did not undertake to make the Act applicable to all occupations which affect commerce, we held that the services of elevator men and other service employees in a manufacturing loft building, where those services contributed to and assisted the manufacturing process carried on there, were within the Act. But nothing then decided or said seems to me to justify our saying that the elevator men and other maintenance employees in an office building, in which no manufacturing is done, either participate in or are necessary to the manufacturing process, because tenants of its building are ex*686ecutive or administrative officers of a company which does manufacturing elsewhere.
The fact that it is convenient or even necessary for the president of the company to ride in an elevator does not seem to me to meet the requirement of the statute that the occupation must be one necessary to the physical process of production. The statute includes those who are necessary to that process, but it does not also include those who are necessary to them. The manufacturing process could proceed without many activities which are necessary or convenient to the executive officers of a manufacturing company but which do not in any direct or immediate manner contribute to the manufacturing process, as did the services rendered in Kirschbaum Co. v. Walling, supra.
The services rendered in this case would seem to be no more related, and no more necessary to the processes of production than the services of the cook who prepares the meals of the president of the company or the chauffeur who drives him to his office. Compare McLeod v. Threlkeld, 319 U. S. 491. All are too remote from the physical process of production to be said to be, in any practical sense, a part of or necessary to it.
I would reverse the judgment.
Mr. Justice Roberts joins in this opinion.