Court Opinion

ID: 9637739
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 15:17:46.264671+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:09:59.901975
License: Public Domain

SIBLEY, Circuit Judge
(concurring).
I concur in the judgment of affirmance. If a private corporation had furnished the factory, all tools, and materials, agreed to pay all costs of production plus a fixed fee for goods produced, and exercised the control that the government did in this case, I would have no trouble in holding that the operation was that of the private corporation, and that the contractor was not an independent contractor. As in the case of St. Johns River Shipbuilding Co. v. Adams, 5 Cir., 164 F.2d 1012,1 would prefer to pass over the question of independent contractor, to the question' of whether commerce was involved. All the overtime sued for here was earned, if at all, during 1944 and 1945, when the war effort was at its peak, and munitions were produced for immediate use, and under the greatest pressure. I do not think that the government would have committed the business folly of making cost-plus contracts otherwise. As is shown by several Acts passed during the emergency period relating to wages and overtime, all of which deny double damages and attorneys fees where time and a half pay for overtime is provided for, as well as by the retrospective Portal-to-Portal Act, 29 U.S.C.A. § 251 et seq. the United States did not contemplate becoming the penalized person through cost-plus contracts. While haste was foremost, and cost secondary, I think it clear that no one concerned thought that the work was work in commerce or in producing goods for commerce, or would fall under the peace time Fair Labor Standards Act. Certainly “substandard wages” did not prevail in these public war projects. If the Constitution had vested the war power in the federal government, and left the regulation of Commerce to the States, so that an Act like the Fair Labor Standards Act had been enacted by the States, no one would contend that the war power was circumscribed by the States’ commercial legislation. That is because war is not commerce. This case deals with war and not commerce.