Maneja v. Waialua Agricultural Co. ( 1955 )

Mr. Justice Burton,

whom Mr. Justice Frankfurter and Mr. Justice Harlan join,

concurring in part

and dissenting in part.

The Waialua Agricultural Company performs the closely integrated function not merely of growing, harvesting and gathering sugar cane from its fields, but of promptly processing that cumbersome, perishable crop into transportable, marketable raw sugar and molasses. If not so processed, the cane spoils. The processing, therefore, is as essential to the success of the sugar cane plantation as the growing and harvesting of the cane itself. The question before us is the extent to which the employees of Waialua are exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

Congress, in so many words, has excluded from the coverage of the Act “any employee employed in agriculture¹ (Italics supplied.) It has clarified this exemption by adding that—

“ ‘Agriculture’ includes farming in all its branches and among other things includes the cultivation and tillage of the soil . . . the production, cultivation, growing, and harvesting of any agricultural or horticultural commodities . . . and any practices . . . performed by a farmer or on a farm as an incident to or in conjunction with such farming operations, including preparation for market, delivery to storage or to market or to carriers for transportation to market² (Italics supplied.)

In my view, the above definition includes all of the operations of the Waialua Agricultural Company.³ It is difficult to conceive of terms covering them more adequately. Concededly, the company is a “farmer,” and each of the practices involved here readily can be conceived of as being performed by it on its farm as an incident to or in conjunction with growing, harvesting and preparing its sugar cane for market or for delivery to carriers for transportation to market.

The Court goes far toward adopting the above view. By applying the agricultural exemption to Waialua’s employees who grow or harvest the sugar cane, and to those who deliver the cane to the processing mill, the Court completely relieves Waialua of the wage and hour requirements of the Act in relation to those employees. On the other hand, the Court declines to apply the agricultural exemption to Waialua’s processing employees. The consequence of this is minimized by two factors. First, the resulting subjection of Waialua to the minimum wage requirements of the Act adds no burden because Waialua, of its own accord, pays its processing employees more than the required minimum. Secondly, any burden due to the resulting subjection of Waialua to the statutory 40-hour week, with increased pay for overtime, is not great, because § 7 (c)⁴ specifically grants exemption from such regulation to “employees in any place of employment where” the employer is engaged in processing sugar cane into raw sugar or syrup.

However, the processing exemption, under § 7 (c), is not the full equivalent of the agricultural exemption under §§13 (a)(6) and 3(f). The exemption under § 7 (c) is limited to the overtime provisions of the Act and does not extend to the minimum wage provisions. It is construed to cover only tasks that are “closely and intimately connected” with the actual processing of sugar cane in a mill, whereas the agricultural exemption is not so restricted. The Court makes this clear. Section 7 (c) is held by it not to reach services performed by Waialua’s processing employees in the mill during the “off season” when no cane is actually being processed there. Still other areas of uncertainty appear where the Court requires further findings as to the work done in the laboratory, the concrete products plant and the power plant before determining the status of employees engaged in those operations.⁵

If the agricultural exemption be given the broad application to which I believe it entitled, no line need be drawn between processing and other agricultural activities. Each of the above activities would be exempt because each is “incident to or [is performed] in conjunction with” the agricultural operation of growing, harvesting, preparing and delivering the cane to market.

The Court recognizes that the large size of Waialua’s plantation makes necessary the specialization of labor incidental to its sugar cane production and marketing. Mere size and mechanization of Waialua’s farming operations are not, in themselves, grounds for excluding any of its employees from the agricultural exemption. As I see it, the statutory definition of agriculture describes a major activity which lies beyond the outer limits of the Fair Labor Standards Act. “Agriculture” is not an exception carved out of the jurisdiction of the Act. Congress never proposed to apply the Act to agriculture. To any extent that the Act impinges upon agricultural activities, those impingements are themselves exceptions to the general freedom that characterizes agricultural employment.

The legislative history supports an all-inclusive, rather than a restrictive, interpretation of the word "agriculture” as used here. When Senate Bill 2475, which became the Fair Labor Standards Act, was reported favorably by the Senate Committee on Education and Labor, it exempted “any person employed in agriculture.” It provided that as “used in this Act, the term ‘agriculture’ includes j arming in all its branches and . . . any practices ordinarily performed by a farmer as an incident to such farming operations." (Italics supplied.) Id., Calendar No. 905, 75th Cong., 1st Sess. 51. Congress proposed thereby to exempt “persons engaged in agriculture and such processing of agricultural commodities as is ordinarily performed by farmers as an incident of farm operations.” (Italics supplied.) S. Rep. No. 884, 75th Cong., 1st Sess. 6. The exemption was thus expressly made applicable at least to the ordinary processing of agricultural commodities while converting them from their natural state to a marketable form.

In the ensuing debate, attention was directed specifically to sugar cane. In answer to whether syrup mills, operated on sugar cane plantations, would be exempt, the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Education and Labor stated that “If ... it is a practice not ordinarily performed by a farmer as incident to his farming operations . . . [it] would not come under the definition.” (Italics supplied.) 81 Cong. Rec. 7657. However, this restriction of the agricultural exemption significantly disappeared when the word “ordinarily” was intentionally stricken out of the definition of agriculture. H. R. Rep. No. 1452, 75th Cong., 1st Sess. 11. In its final stage, “agriculture” became substantially all-inclusive. It covered “any practices performed by a farmer or on a farm as an incident to such farming operations, including preparation for market, delivery to storage or to market or to carriers for transportation to market.” S. 2475, Union Calendar No. 804, 75th Cong., 3d Sess. 50.

Emphasis thus was shifted from ordinary practices incident to farming operations to all practices incident to farming operations, including those incident to the preparation or delivery of agricultural products to storage or to market. Operations, such as those of a shirt factory on a cotton farm, are said to be excluded from the agricultural exemption, not because they are not ordinarily operated by farmers, but because they are neither incident to farming operations nor appropriate to the preparation of a farm product for its initial market. Accordingly, the essential inquiry in the instant case is whether Waialua’s processing of sugar cane is incident to farming operations, including those necessary or appropriate to prepare the cane product for storage or for its market. The answer should be that harvested sugar cane is so highly perishable that it must be processed promptly in order to be either stored or marketed. It naturally follows, therefore, that such processing, done by a farmer on a farm, should be recognized as “agriculture” equally with the growing and harvesting of the crop.

Emphasizing this view, in 1939, the Department of Labor issued Interpretative Bulletin No. 14. It then said unequivocally that the words “preparation for market” included the processing of sugar cane into raw sugar and molasses. It classified that operation with cotton ginning and the packing or canning of other agricultural commodities. Id., § 10 (b), 35 Wage and Hour Man. 351, 355.⁶ Being substantially contemporaneous with the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, such an initial interpretation of the statute is entitled to special weight. United States v. American Trucking Assns., 310 U. S. 534, 549.

While the Court suggests that § 7 (c) lends support to its conclusion that the agricultural exemption does not apply to processing operations, I believe that the presence of § 7 (c) supports the opposite conclusion. Section 7 (c) was inserted in the bill largely in answer to the argument that the agricultural exemption (in §§13 (a)(6) and 3 (f)) would relieve the large processing farmers from the restrictions of the Fair Labor Standards Act and thus help them market their raw sugar or molasses more cheaply than the smaller farmers who would be compelled to employ nonexempt independent processors. Section 7 (c), accordingly, was added to relieve such independent processors from the overtime requirements of the Fair Labor Standards Act in tacit recognition of the existing exemption of the processing farmers under the agricultural exemption.

In § 13 (a) (10),⁷ Congress similarly exempted from the wage and hour provisions of the Act all employees “within the area of production . . . engaged in handling, packing, storing, ginning, compressing, pasteurizing, drying, preparing in their raw or natural state, or canning of agricultural or horticultural commodities for market . . . .” (Italics supplied.) It is argued that, by failing to list sugar cane processing specifically in § 13 (a) (10), Congress implies that the general agricultural exemption is not applicable to sugar cane processing. No such conclusion is justified. Section 13 (a) (10) was added late in the legislative development of the bill, not to restrict existing exemptions, but to create further exemptions. It was added in order to exempt the activities of packers, ginners and others providing service anywhere “within the area of production.” If §13 (a) (10) had listed sugar cane processing, it would have extended the minimum wage exemption to independent processors throughout surrounding areas of production. To do so was entirely optional with Congress and its mere failure to do so implies no purpose, sub silentio, to reduce the scope of the agricultural exemption already extended, in positive and sweeping terms, in response to an insistent demand for the exemption of all farming operations.

Accordingly, while I concur in reversing the judgment of the Court of Appeals and in the application of the agricultural exemption to the extent that it is applied by this Court, I would remand the entire cause to the District Court with a direction to enter judgment in favor of the Waialua Agricultural Company in accordance with this opinion.

1 § 13 (a) (6), 52 Stat. 1067, 29 U. S. C. § 213 (a) (6).

2 § 3 (f), 52 Stat. 1060, 29 U. S. C. §203 (f).

3 Except the maintenance of Waialua Village, which, for other reasons, as the Court explains, does not come under the coverage of the Act.

4 52 Stat. 1063, 29 U. S. C. §207 (c).

5 In the laboratory, Waialua employs, in a separate building, 14 chemists, testers and samplers who analyze cane leaf, juice, fiber and ash, raw sugar and molasses, water used in all operations, etc., so as to have all operations controlled by scientific methods. In the concrete products plant, it employs, in a separate building, four to ten men primarily making irrigation flumes and water supply pipe. Other products include concrete blocks, footings and sidewalk slabs required on the plantation. Cement and other materials used in making these products are purchased off the plantation. For the power plant, the “bagasse,” or cane fiber remaining after the extraction of its juice, supplies fuel. Waialua burns it to produce steam which drives mill machinery, heats sugar juice and generates electric power. The electric power, in turn, serves various operations on the plantation. The integrated nature of these operations emphasizes the propriety and practicality of the blanket agricultural exemption in relation to them. It demonstrates also the difficulty of drawing lines between such naturally related operations.

6 It appears that the Administrator of the Wage and Hour Division later withdrew from that position in deference to a decision in 1941 by the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Bowie v. Gonzalez, 117 F. 2d 11. That court there held that certain processors who processed sugar cane, other than their own, did not come within the agricultural exemption. The Administrator, in concluding that the processing of sugar cane by a farmer on his own farm, in his own plant, also was to be excluded from the agricultural exemption, extended the decision beyond the point at issue. See Farmers Irrigation Co. v. McComb, 337 U. S. 755, 766-767, n. 15.

I do not attach significance to the failure of Congress to make specific reference to this point in its 1949 amendments. By its savings clause, Congress reserved the issue of the validity of the Administrator’s interpretation of the Act. It did this by providing generally that existing interpretations of the Administrator remain in effect but expressly excepting “the extent that any such . . . interpretation . . . may be inconsistent with the provisions of this Act . . . .” 63 Stat. 920. The pendency of the instant litigation at that time was called to the attention of the appropriate Committee of Congress and it was shown that the Administrator had not instituted that suit, or any other, in reliance upon the interpretation now claimed. Hearings before House Committee on Education and Labor on H. R. 2033, 81st Cong., 1st Sess. 1165-1169. To use the 1949 savings clause as confirming the consistency, with the statute, of the Administrator’s interpretation is to assume that very consistency in order to establish it.

7 52 Stat. 1067, 29 U. S. C. § 213 (a) (10).