Court Opinion

ID: 9419267
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 22:48:14.513842+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:22:16.978043
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Roberts:
I dissent, as I did in Kirschbaum Co. v. Walling, 316 U. S. 517, and for the same reason. But I think the present a more extravagant application of the statute than that there approved. We may assume that Congress, in drafting the Act, had in mind the practical, as distinguished from a theoretical, distinction between what is national and what is local, — between what, in fact, touches interstate commerce and what, in truth, is intrastate.
The phrases on which respondents rely are these: An employee “who is engaged in [interstate] commerce or in the production of goods for [interstate] commerce,” § 7 (a); and “ ‘Produced’ means produced, manufactured, *94mined, handled, or in any other manner worked on in any State; and for the purposes of this Act an employee shall be deemed to have been engaged in the production of goods if such employee was employed in producing, manufacturing, mining, handling, transporting, or in any other manner working on such goods, or in any process or occupation necessary to the production thereof, in any State,” § 3 (j).
The opinion disavows any thought that the respondents may be classed as those who mine the oil which passes into commerce; but this seems to be a reservation intended not to preclude such a holding. The Court relies, rather, on the Act’s inclusion of anyone employed “in any process or occupation necessary to the production” of goods for commerce.
The reasoning seems to be as follows: The oil will pass into commerce if it is mined. But it cannot be mined unless somebody drills a well. An independent contractor’s men do part of the drilling. Their work is “necessary” to the mining and the transportation of the oil. So they fall within the Act.
This is to ignore all practical distinction between what is parochial and what is national. It is but the application to the practical affairs of life of a philosophic and impractical test. It is but to repeat, in another form, the old story of the pebble thrown into the pool, and the theoretically infinite extent of the resulting waves, albeit too tiny to be seen or felt by the exercise of one’s senses.
The labor of the man who made the tools which drilled the well, that of the sawyer who cut the wood incidentally used, that of him who mined the iron of which the tools were made, are all just as necessary to the ultimate extraction of oil as the labor of respondents. Each is an antecedent of the consequent, — the production of the goods for commerce. Indeed, if respondents were not fed, they could not have drilled the well, and the oil would not have *95gone into commerce. Is the cook’s work “necessary” to the production of the oil, and within the Act?
I think Congress could not and did not intend to exert its granted power over interstate commerce upon what in practice and common understanding is purely local activity, on the pretext that everything everybody does is a contributing cause to the existence of commerce between the States, and in that sense necessary to its existence.