National Labor Relations Board v. Hearst Publications/Dissent Roberts

by Owen J. Roberts

United States Supreme Court

322 U.S. 111

National Labor Relations Board  v.  Hearst Publications

 Argued: Feb. 8, 9, 1944. --- Decided: April 24, 1944

Mr. Justice ROBERTS.

I think the judgment of the Circuit Court of Appeals should be affirmed. The opinion of that court reported in 136 F.2d 608, seems to me adequately to state the controlling facts and correctly to deal with the question of law presented for decision. I should not add anything were it not for certain arguments presented here and apparently accepted by the court.

I think it plain that newsboys are not 'employees' of the respondents within the meaning and intent of the National Labor Relations Act. When Congress, in § 2(3), 29 U.S.C.A. § 152(3), said: 'The term 'employee' shall include any employee, * * *' it stated as clearly as language could do it that the provisions of the Act were to extend to those who, as a result of decades of tradition which had become part of the common understanding of our people, bear the named relationship. Clearly also Congress did not delegate to the National Labor Relations Board the function of defining the relationship of employment so as to promote what the Board understood to be the underlying purpose of the statute. The question who is an employee, so as to make the statute applicable to him, is a question of the meaning of the Act and, therefore, is a judicial and not an administrative question.

I do not think that the court below suggested that the federal courts sitting in the various states must determine whether a given person is an employee by application of either the local statutes or local state decisions. Quite the contrary. As a result of common law development, many prescriptions of federal statutes take on meaning which is uniformly ascribed to them by the federal courts, irrespective of local variance. Funk v. United States, 290 U.S. 371, 54 S.Ct. 212, 78 L.Ed. 369, 93 A.L.R. 1136. This court has repeatedly resorted to just such considerations in defining the very term 'employee' as used in other federal statutes, as the opinion of the court below shows. There is a general and prevailing rule throughout the Union as to the indicia of employment and the criteria of one's status as employee. Unquestionably it was to this common, general, and prevailing understanding that Congress referred in the statute and, according to that understanding, the facts stated in the opinion below, and in that of this court, in my judgment, demonstrate that the newsboys were not employees of the newspapers.

It is urged that the Act uses the term in some loose and unusual sense such as justifies the Board's decision because Congress added to the definition of employee above quoted these further words: 'and shall not be limited to the employees of a particular employer, unless the Act explicitly states otherwise, * * *.' The suggestion seems to be that Congress intended that the term employee should mean those who were not in fact employees, but it is perfectly evident, not only from the provisions of the Act as a whole but from the Senate Committee's Report, that this phrase was added to prevent any misconception of the provisions whereby employees were to be allowed freely to combine and to be represented in collective bargaining by the representatives of their union. Congress intended to make it clear that employee organizations did not have to be organizations of the employees of any single employer. But that qualifying phrase means no more than this and was never intended to permit the Board to designate as employees those who, in traditional understanding, have no such status.

Notes