Waialua Agricultural Co. v. Maneja, 13114.

• Decision Date: 08 November 1954
• Docket Number: No. 13114.,13114.
• Parties: WAIALUA AGRICULTURAL CO., Limited v. MANEJA et al.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Ninth Circuit

216 F.2d 466 (1954)

WAIALUA AGRICULTURAL CO., Limited v. MANEJA et al.

No. 13114.

United States Court of Appeals Ninth Circuit.

May 5, 1954.

Rehearing Denied June 24, 1954.

Writ of Certiorari Granted November 8, 1954.

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL OMITTED

Rufus G. Poole, Milton C. Denbo, Washington, D. C., Livingston Jenks, Anderson, Wrenn & Jenks, Ernest C. Moore, Jr., Pratt, Tavares & Cassidy, Honolulu, Hawaii, for appellant.

William S. Tyson, Sol., Bessie Margolin, Asst. Sol., William A. Lowe and Harold S. Saxe, Attys., Dept. of Labor, Washington, D. C., amicus curiae.

Richard Gladstein, Gladstein, Andersen & Leonard, San Francisco, Cal., for appellees.

Before HEALY, BONE, and FEE, Circuit Judges.

Writ of Certiorari Granted November 8, 1954. See 75 S.Ct. 111.

JAMES ALGER FEE, Circuit Judge.

This case must be reversed for error in approach. Waialua initiated the procedure by petition for declaratory judgment. The trial court, misled by the nature of the cause and the attitudes of the parties, decided the wrong issue.

The status of Waialua was tried out. It was contended by Waialua that it was engaged in agriculture, and therefore all of its employees were exempt from application of the statute. The trial court, in its first declaration, which was reversed for lack of findings, and in its present declaration and judgment, took the converse position. It has held that Waialua, through corporate affiliations, interlocking directorates and factor relationships, was a manufacturer of refined sugar on the mainland, and there engaged in interstate and foreign commerce.¹

By agreement of all parties and the Department of Labor, that Court finds that all employees of Waialua except one group² "are engaged in commerce or in the production of goods for commerce." Therefore, it was concluded that every employee of Waialua on Oahu, Territory of Hawaii, was subject to the drastic provisions of the Act for each work week in which he did not spend every employed hour in an activity such as planting, irrigating, cultivating, ratooning or cutting and loading cane.³ In pursuit of the fallacy so induced, the Court refused to describe each employee who harvested the crop by reducing cane to raw sugar and molasses, an operation essential to its preservation, as an agricultural worker.⁴

Thus the trial court did not give effect to the language of the statute which excludes from its operation anyone "employed in agriculture"⁵ and defines "agriculture" to include "farming in all its branches and among other things * * the cultivation and tillage of the soil, dairying, the production, cultivation, growing, and harvesting of any agricultural and 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 market."⁶

After a remand upon a previous appeal,⁷ on motion of Waialua, the International Union was eliminated and its Secretary, Jack Hall, stricken from the defendants. The representative character of the original proceeding was also abandoned. The individual workers, most of whom were retainers and dependents of Waialua although union members, were permitted to file a so-called cross-complaint, praying for relief in sums of money, and this time several of these individual employees gave testimony as to the kind of work each did. None of these devices, adopted to meet criticism of this Court, changed the fundamental character of the proceeding. The individual employee cross-complainants still seem "pawns in this battle of the demi-gods." Waialua seems to act to preserve relations with the Union and a federal bureau, as a policy. Practically all facts are agreed and, as above noted, constitutional and jurisdictional conclusions as to coverage were accepted. Thereby, emphasis was placed upon the wrong problems.⁸ This conjugation by consent removes the cause from the class of "cases and controversies" and is an abuse of declaratory judgment procedure. The only bitterly partisan litigant is an executive bureau not named in the record as a party. Notwithstanding a plain warning of this Court upon the last appeal that such evidence was impertinent to the whole question as to whether the individual employee was an "agricultural worker," the parties introduced at this trial and the Court adopted as a basis for decision two treatises. These were entitled, respectively, "Labor in the Territory of Hawaii, 1939"⁹ and "The Economy of Hawaii in 1947,"¹⁰ studies made under the supervision of a department of the government, which, as noted above, took an active part not only in the trial court, but on both appeals.

Thus a false issue was created. Instead of concern with the question of who was employed in agriculture, the attention of the Court was deflected to a consideration of membership of Waialua in a non-profit sugar refining and marketing cooperative called "California & Hawaiian Sugar Refining Corporation, Ltd.", of California, which was engaged in the manufacturing business of refining raw sugar, marketing the product, and transporting the refined sugar to the consumers.¹¹ But all the activities of the latter were carried on upon the mainland. No one of its employees is here involved. None of the workers of Waialua was employed by the cooperative.

If the pertinent question of employment in farming had been considered instead, then the language of the statute defining such employees would have been given effect.¹²

The decisions of this Court bear out the breadth of the exclusion of agricultural workers. Dofflemyer v. National Labor Relations Board, 9 Cir., 206 F.2d 813 (Judge Healy) shows that technical distinctions should not be used to circumscribe the words "farmer" and "farm" as used in the Act. The necessity for immediate processing of a farm product is of great force in emphasizing the scope of the agricultural exclusion, according to Judge Bone, writing for the majority in McComb v. Hunt Foods, 9 Cir., 167 F.2d 905, where the interpretations of three different district courts in widely separated agricultural areas of the mainland are followed. There the Court said:

"`The policy of protection to the growers of "perishable and seasonal fresh fruits" is of as much force as that of the protection of general industrial workers. The objective of a uniform rule for hours and wages in manufacturing should not be allowed to prevail over the paramount necessity of garnering and preserving fruits and grains and the protection of those who grow them when Congress equally recognized both in the Act. The hypertechnical reasoning concerning "exceptions" and "exemptions" has no place here. A direct expression of non-applicability constitutes neither.\'

"This is but another way of saying that if the business operations claimed to be exempt are found to fall within the exempt classification, the statute is, as to them, a `remedial\' statute. We agree with the lower court that no formalistic characterization should be permitted in dealing with any of these clauses since the plain intention of the statute should be carried out." 167 F.2d at page 906.

The trial court was thus in error in requiring Waialua to prove beyond peradventure the affirmative of the proposition that each worker was employed in agriculture and in activities by a farmer and on a farm. By an unwarrantedly strict construction, Waialua was required to establish exemptions beyond a reasonable doubt, as though it were negativing a jurisdictional proviso in an indictment.

Upon the former appeal, to which reference has been made, the Court questioned the aptness of the declaratory proceeding, but remanded because the findings were not sufficient to support any judgment. The findings before us are now meticulous and exact as to the hours and type of work performed by each worker defendant during each work week in question. However, the trial court failed to find many vital facts which the record, as we view it, bears out, and made many findings which are clearly erroneous. For these reasons alone, the cause must be reversed.

A vital finding contains the implication that sugar cane can be stored in Hawaii three or four days without spoiling.¹³ In fact, a delay of three or four hours is apparently deleterious, and for best results the cane, after cutting, should move continuously from field to crushing mill.¹⁴ The Court concludes that no worker at the crushing mill is employed in agriculture but is exempt only insofar as he assists in first processing. If necessity for immediate treatment for preservation had been found, the Court would have been impelled to find an employee at the mill was engaged in "harvesting" an agricultural product. The Court found transportation of cane from fields to cars was farming, but carrying of cane on cars drawn by a locomotive from loading points to the mill was "railroading" and transportation in commerce. Again, the railroad and its crew performed no other kinds of transportation, and therefore what each did was "harvesting." The complete operation was vitally necessary to put the crop into a form in which it would not spoil and, as "raw sugar," could be transported to the mainland for manufacturing. Any activity of any employee which assisted in this operation, whether furnishing power to the mill or hauling cane from field to mill, fell within the express word "harvesting" used in the enactment. Such a finding was not made. Those which were made were erroneous.

Even if it could have been concluded that these activities were not "harvesting," they were nevertheless carried on by a "farmer."¹⁵ Furthermore, such activities were performed "on a farm." On either of these independent grounds, workers so employed were excluded by the enactment.

But the Court failed to find that Waialua was a farmer.¹⁶ The record and stipulations show conclusively that...