Under the Supreme Court’s new “fair reading” doctrine, will FLSA exemptions be interpreted more broadly?

Historically courts have interpreted the overtime exemptions in FLSA (the Fair Labor Standards Act) narrowly in favor of employees. This “narrow construction” doctrine has made it difficult to treat employees who may be exempt as such unless they clearly fit an exemption. Now, the Supreme Court has rejected the “narrow construction” doctrine, ruling that it has not been “a useful guidepost for interpreting FLSA.”

The Supreme Court held that FLSA’s overtime obligations consist of two basic chunks of statutory language: The first requires employees to be paid overtime; the second chunk of language is a series of exemptions from that general rule. The Supreme Court held that FLSA provided courts with no basis for giving the first chunk of language any greater significance than the second chunk, in other words, to read the overtime requirement broadly at the expense of having to read the exemptions narrowly. Instead the Supreme Court held, both chunks of language should be given equal importance. The Supreme Court called this a “fair reading.”

Those exemptions are as much a part of theFLSA’s purpose as the overtime-pay requirement. See id., at ___ (slip op., at 9) (“Legislation is, after all, the art of compromise, the limitations expressed in statutory terms often the price of passage”). We thus have no license to give the exemption anything but a fair reading.

Having rejected the narrow-construction doctrine, and instead applying its fair-reading doctrine, the Supreme Court then held that, in this case, service advisors at the car dealership in question qualified for an overtime exemption under FLSA’s special exemption for salesmen at car dealerships.

It is likely this ruling will have substantial impact in all FLSA overtime cases. It will not be limited to the FLSA’s exemption for salesmen at car dealerships. Rather the fair-reading doctrine will substantially expand the reach of all of FLSA’s overtime exemptions.

Source: Encino Motorcars, LLC v. Navarro, case no. 16-1362 (2018).