Court Opinion

ID: 9575326
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 21:13:01.645291+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T12:45:53.604358
License: Public Domain

Caporale, J.,
dissenting.
I must respectfully dissent, for the majority, in my view, has stretched the meaning of being engaged in interstate commerce further than congressional direction, judicial precedent, or disciplined thought permits. The majority comes to the novel conclusion that people themselves can be articles of commerce, when they come from elsewhere to live in Nebraska on a permanent basis.
While it is true that the Fair Labor Standards Act is to be construed liberally, Tony & Susan Alamo Foundation v. Sec’y of Labor, 471 U.S. 290, 105 S. Ct. 1953, 85 L. Ed. 2d 278 (1985), it must nonetheless be applied with reason and commonsense, Dunlop v. Ashy, 555 F.2d 1228 (5th Cir. 1977), and consistent with congressional direction, Brennan v. Plaza Shoe Store, Inc., 522 F.2d 843 (8th Cir. 1975).
The majority acknowledges that an enterprise such as the *758Mercy Villa Care Center is usually found to be engaged in interstate commerce on the basis of a record which establishes that it uses, or its employees handle, goods which were manufactured, processed, or supplied by sources outside the state. The majority also acknowledges that no such record exists in this case. So far as the record tells us, the center may be an entirely self-sufficient and self-contained organization from which only intrastate telephone calls are made and which produces on its own premises all the commodities it and its residents or patients use and its employees handle; an unlikely condition to be sure, but a condition which the record does not belie and the nonexistence of which plaintiff had the burden to establish. Warren-Bradshaw Co. v. Hall, 317 U.S. 88, 63 S. Ct. 125, 87 L. Ed. 83 (1942).
Given that record, the majority relies on three cases to rationalize its result. It is true that the first of these, Marshall v. Sideris, 524 F. Supp. 521 (D. Neb. 1981), applied the act to an enterprise which operated hotels to accommodate transient guests. The focus of that case, however, was on whether the activities of the multiple owners were such as to make their combined operations a single enterprise. The case contains no analysis of what there was about the enterprise that engaged it in commerce. I am thus led to conclude that whether the enterprise was engaged in commerce was assumed and was not a contested issue. Even if the situation were otherwise, there was at least evidence that the enterprise in Sideris accommodated transients and the suggestion is that their movement affected commerce. The businesses in the remaining two cases relied upon by the majority, Wirtz v. Healy, 227 F. Supp. 123 (N.D. Ill. 1964), and Atlanta Motel v. United States, 379 U.S. 241, 85 S. Ct. 348, 13 L. Ed. 2d 258 (1964), involved the interstate movement of people as an integral part of the operations in question. That element does not exist in the present case. So far as the record shows, the opposite is true; that is, the center provides its residents or patients with a place to live on a permanent basis, not with a place at which to stop while they travel through Nebraska. Neither does the fact that its residents or patients receive out-of-state visitors make the movement of people an integral part of the center’s operations.
*759It seems to me we should review the correctness of the trial court’s judgment on the basis of the record which was actually made before that court, not on the basis of a record which the majority assumes could have been made.
I submit that if the record in this case truly establishes that the center is engaged in interstate commerce, then Congress has greater control, through the commerce clause of the federal Constitution, over what is done within the borders of this state than has ever been known before.
Shanahan, J., j oins in this dissent.