Court Opinion

ID: 9855439
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 06:24:50.810062+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:35:20.362077
License: Public Domain

NEELY, Justice,
dissenting in part and concurring in part:
Although I concur in the result reversing and remanding this case for further proceedings, I respectfully dissent to the majority’s reasoning on the grounds that the nature of the firemen’s occupation and W. Va. Code 8-15-10 [1971] sufficiently indicate a prior mutual understanding between the City of Morgantown and the firemen’s association that firemen work a 56-hour week. •
The Court refuses this day to recognize and accept the peculiarities of firefighting. Rather than accept the firemen’s task for what it is, a unique reserve force resorted to in emergencies, the Court regards firemen simply as routine municipal employees akin to sanitation workers, street maintenance laborers, or even dog-catchers. Firemen, like the police, are municipal employees of a special kind.
All work has two dimensions — length and intensity. There are some jobs, among them those of our often heroic firemen, where the length factor is offset by the intensity factor. When engaged in extinguishing fires there is no doubt that firemen have a dangerous and frighteningly difficult occupation. But much of their time, and this is not meant as criticism, is spent relaxing and waiting to be called. The fireman waits to be summoned for a conflagration. Although firemen maintain their equipment and facilities themselves, they do not patrol our cities like their brethren the police. Firemen wait to respond. In this sense, a fireman’s employment resembles that of a soldier in the nation’s standing army. He awaits that awful moment when his services will be required. Patriot soldiers and firemen alike are maintained in readiness to attend to an unforeseen tragedy whose occurrence can never be predicted.
The majority opinion cites cases dealing with stevedores, truckers, gasoline station operators and maintenance and service employees. By this litany, the Court seeks to buttress its holding that firemen are not expected to work over forty hours a week without receiving overtime bonuses. What is glaringly lacking, however, is any recognition of the sui generis nature of fire*129fighting. Firefighting is not, simply, another occupation.
The Court states, in syllabus point 2, the inference to be made when employees are compensated on a lump-sum basis. But the Court thoughtfully attached a caveat negating this inference when explicit proof exists of another mutually agreed upon rate of pay. In the case of the firefighters of Morgantown such proof exists in W. Va. Code 8-15-10 [1971].
W.Va.Code 8-15-10 [1971] is clear evidence of the legislative expectation that firemen will be on duty more than forty hours each week. The statute prohibits firemen from working over one hundred twelve hours during any fortnight, absent an emergency. Both the city and its firefighters can reasonably have been thought to expect this provision to govern any contract in which they engaged; thus, the 56-hour workweek is the norm in firefighting.
In addition, as further evidence of an agreement on the 56-hour workweek, the City’s personnel rules adopt the expectation of W. Va.Code 8-15-10 [1971] that firemen, alone among municipal employees, are expected to work fifty-six hours. The Court defies logic by suggesting implicitly that the City contracted with the firemen for sixteen hours weekly overtime. The City and the firefighters’ association both freely agreed to a unique firefighters’ workweek. Overtime would only be paid in excess of fifty-six hours.
The Court, therefore, refuses to uphold the foundation of a contract that the parties freely entered into. Contractus legem ex combentione accipiunt. The parties understood the peculiar nature of a fireman’s employment and distinguished firemen accordingly. The majority’s holding denies the municipality the relief it is entitled to and one that equity righteously demands.