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Long Island Care at Home v. Coke

Issues

Must a federal court defer to a Department of Labor regulation that interprets the Fair Labor Standards Act as exempting home care workers employed by agencies or other third parties if the regulation was published under the heading “Interpretations?”

 

The Fair Labor Standards Act sets the minimum wage and other mandatory benefits for workers. Homecare workers such as babysitters and companions to the elderly are exempt from its provisions when employed directly for the family they work for, but what about when they are employed by a third party provider of such services? After following a notice-and-comment rulemaking procedure the Department of Labor said, in 29 C.F.R. § 552.109(a) under the heading “interpretations,” that such third-party employed workers are exempt from the minimum wage requirement. Coke, a homecare worker employed by third-party provider Long Island Care at Home, brought suit questioning the validity of § 109(a). The Second Circuit Court of Appeals held the regulation was unenforceable. The United States Supreme Court now takes up the question of whether the Second Circuit gave the proper amount of deference to the Department of Labor’s stance on the regulation in question.

Questions as Framed for the Court by the Parties

Whether the Second Circuit erred in refusing to give deference under Chevron, U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Res. Def. Council, Inc., 467 U.S. 837 (1984), to a thirty-year-old Department of Labor regulation—a regulation that has twice been upheld by the Tenth Circuit—on the ground that, even though it was promulgated under express grants of legislative authority and after full notice-and-comment rulemaking, the regulation was contained in a subpart headed “Interpretations.”
Whether, in holding that a longstanding Department of Labor regulation was not persuasive and thus undeserving of any deference under Skidmore v. Swift & Co., 323 U.S. 134 (1944), the Second Circuit erred by failing to address the governing provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act and by declining to give any weight to the Department’s interpretation of its own regulations.

Originally, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) mandated a minimum wage and overtime benefits to those workers whose employer was engaged in commerce or produced goods for commerce and whose gross sales met or exceeded $250,000. 29 U.S.C. § 213.

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