Williams v. WMA Transit Company
| Decision Date | 30 June 1972 |
| Docket Number | No. 24485.,24485. |
| Parties | Kenneth C. WILLIAMS et al., Appellants, v. W. M. A. TRANSIT COMPANY, Appellee. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — District of Columbia Circuit |
Mr. Stanley O. Sher, Washington, D. C., with whom Messrs. Michael G. Kushnick and Alan S. Davis, Washington, D. C., were on the brief, for appellants.
Mr. William B. Devaney, Washington, D. C., with whom Mr. Stanley H. Kamerow, Washington, D. C., was on the brief, for appellee.
Messrs. C. Francis Murphy, Corp. Counsel for the District of Columbia, Richard W. Barton and Leo N. Gorman, Asst. Corp. Counsels, filed a brief on behalf of the District of Columbia, as amicus curiae urging reversal.
Before LEVENTHAL, MacKINNON and WILKEY, Circuit Judges.
This is a class action by 92 bus drivers, for themselves and others similarly situated, against the WMA Transit Company, their employer, for its failure to pay overtime compensation for hours worked in excess of 40 hours per week, claimed to be required by the District of Columbia Minimum Wage Act of 1966 (D.C.Act).1 We need not and do not consider the Company's claims that it did not work its men overtime, and that it obtained a release. The case comes to us in the posture of a summary judgment entered by the Court of General Sessions (now Superior Court) sustaining the contention that the D.C.Act does not apply to these employees, which the District of Columbia Court of Appeals (DCCA) affirmed.2
While this case involves the construction of the D.C.Act, its sound disposition requires consideration of the inter-relation between the D.C.Act and the Federal statutory provisions relating to minimum compensation and maximum hours for bus drivers in interstate commerce. We reverse and remand.
The material facts3 may be briefly stated as follows:
The Company is a Delaware corporation with offices on the Maryland side of the District boundary. The Company has no facilities in the District of Columbia, but it stations dispatchers on the streets in the District, and its buses periodically wait at certain locations in the District. It operates three types of service. It runs a Government contract operation which is local within the District but relatively minor. It runs a charter operation — accounting for 19% of driver hours. This is essentially a metropolitan area service. Approximately 60% of the charter groups are picked up in and returned to the District of Columbia, though the Company stresses that the drivers and buses start from and return to garages in Maryland.
The most significant part of the Company's business is its operation of 84 regular bus routes, of which 79 enter the District of Columbia. More than 50% of the regular route passengers are interstate passengers, either picked up in Maryland and discharged in the District, or vice versa. Some passengers are both picked up and discharged in the District, others are Maryland local passengers. The Company receives a cash subsidy from the District of Columbia for transporting D.C. public school children on its routes.
The Company requires its bus drivers to have both D.C. and Maryland licenses. The Company basically does not segregate its drivers according to particular routes or places of operation. They may be asked to move from route to route. The Company made a time study and from this estimates that on the average its bus drivers spend 38% of total pay time within the District. The underlying data show some drivers with work-weeks spent primarily (more than 50%) in the District of Columbia.
1. District Act
The District of Columbia Minimum Wage Act implements its spacious purpose,4 and its specific provisions requiring payment of minimum wages, and overtime compensation, at time and one-half the regular rate, for employees worked longer than 40 hours per week,5 with broad coverage provisions. The basic definitions of "employer" and "employee" are not qualified. See D.C.Code § 36-402:
As passed in 1966 the D.C.Act juxtaposed its broad coverage definitions with exemption from overtime requirements for seven groups of employees — including e. g., "any employee employed by a railroad." These provisions, contained in § 36-404 of the D.C.Code, in subsectoins (a)(1) and (2), and (b)(1)-(5), are not applicable to bus drivers.6
B. Federal Legislation
To ascertain relevant legislative intent we must, as will appear, consider provisions in Federal legislation. The D.C. Act was patterned on the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, as amended, (FLSA) wherein Congress sought to ameliorate conditions found detrimental to the well-being of workers in interstate commerce or the production of goods therefor, by requirements of minimum wages and overtime compensation. In 29 U.S.C. § 207, Congress provided for maximum hours in the work week, with time-and-a-half for overtime, subject to certain exemptions and qualifications. See 29 U.S.C. § 213. Section 213 sets forth a number of exemptions which are the same as those later incorporated into the D.C.Act — for administrative, executive, and professional employees, seamen, railway employees, automobile servicemen and salesmen. Omitted from the D.C.Act is the provision in 29 U.S.C. § 213(b)(1) containing an exemption from overtime requirements as to any employees with respect to whom the ICC (now the Secretary of Transportation) has the power to set maximum hours, a provision applicable of course to employees of common carriers by motor in interstate commerce.7
Another pertinent provision appears in 29 U.S.C. § 218:
No provision of this chapter or of any order thereunder shall excuse non-compliance with any Federal or State law or municipal ordinance establishing a minimum wage higher than the minimum wage established under this chapter or a maximum workweek lower than the maximum workweek established under this chapter * * *.
This section expressly contemplates that workers covered by state law as well as FLSA shall have any additional benefits provided by the state law — higher minimum wages; or lower maximum workweek. By necessary implication it permits state laws to operate even as to workers exempt from FLSA.
1. In ascertaining the intent of Congress, we give great weight to the fact that in the 1966 D.C.Act, which was modeled on the FLSA,8 Congress inserted exemptions from the overtime compensation requirements for seven classes of employees, including the substance, and indeed language, of exemption provisions of FLSA, but omitted the exemption provision set forth in FLSA, § 213(b)(1), for employees as to whom the ICC has power to set maximum hours. That exemption, if available, would extend to employees whose duties affect safety in interstate commerce even though only 3% of their time is spent in interstate commerce. Morris v. McComb, 332 U.S. 422, 68 S.Ct. 131, 92 L.Ed. 44 (1947). Another part of the statutory pattern before us is the provision of the D.C.Act specifically exempting employees of railroads, which compete with buses and trucks. We discern a reasonably clear pattern of intent to withhold from the D.C.Act any exemption for employees, of bus and truck companies, merely because they are subject to ICC regulation due to hours in interstate operations.
Our view is in accord with an opinion of the D.C.Corporation Counsel, March 17, 1969, which is in the record. As to rulings of other states,9 we are advised of a similar ruling, of August 7, 1970, by Maryland's Attorney General, which states that this is also the view obtained orally from the General Counsel of the U.S. Department of Labor.10 The only other ruling, made in 1966 by Maine's Attorney General concludes that the exemption in 29 U.S.C. § 213(b)(1) is applicable to the states, but it rests on premises which are doubtful if not erroneous,11 as will appear from the next section of this opinion.
2. The trial judge held the D.C.Act inapplicable to the Company's bus drivers on the ground that (1) the Federal provisions clearly establish that "among Federal Agencies only the Department of Transportation has authority to regulate overtime pay of drivers employed by an interstate carrier," and (2) the D.C.Act is "purely local in scope and nature" and is inapplicable to this case in view of "the doctrine of federal supremacy in matters concerning interstate commerce."
We see relatively little significance for present purposes in the fact that Congress centralized responsibility in ICC, now DOT, as "among Federal agencies," for this provision, in 29 U.S.C. § 213, was to obviate conflicting determinations as to the content of the Federal requirement.12 That is a different matter from the issue whether or to what extent Congress intended to permit State or District law to apply to bus drivers subject to ICC-DOT authority. We have already noted powerful indicators that Congress did so intend — the provision in 29 U.S.C. § 218 permitting state law to extend benefits to employees given lesser benefits or none by FLSA; and the failure of the 1966 D.C.Act to include § 213(b) (1) in the exemptions copied from FLSA. In contrast, the possibility of Congressional intent to prohibit D.C. coverage of interstate drivers would have to suppose that Congress was content with silence and reliance on the consequences of Federal supremacy doctrine. While we agree with the DCCA that in the D.C.Act Congress did not purport to be exercising power that would be unavailable...
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