Opinion of the Court
before us, these authorities appear to represent at most the vanguard, not the main body, of contemporaneous usage.
New Prime’s effort to explain away the statute’s suggestive use of the term “worker” proves no more compelling. The company reminds us that the statute excludes “contracts of employment” for “seamen” and “railroad employees” as well as other transportation workers. And because “seamen” and “railroad employees” included only employees in 1925, the company reasons, we should understand “any other class of workers engaged in… interstate commerce” to bear a similar construction. But this argument rests on a precarious premise. At the time of the Act’s passage, shipboard surgeons who tended injured sailors were considered “seamen” though they likely served in an independent contractor capacity.[1] Even the term “railroad employees” may have swept more broadly at the time of the Act’s passage than might seem obvious today. In 1922, for example, the Railroad Labor Board interpreted the word “employee” in the Transportation Act of 1920 to refer to anyone “engaged in the customary work directly contributory to the operation of the railroads.”[2] And the Erdman Act, a statute enacted to address disruptive railroad strikes at the end of the 19th century, seems to evince an equally broad understanding of “railroad
- ↑ See, e. g., The Sea Lark, 14 F. 2d 201 (WD Wash. 1926); The Buena Ventura, 243 F. 797, 799 (SDNY 1916); Holt v. Cummings, 102 Pa. 212, 215 (1883); Allan v. State S. S. Co., 132 N. Y. 91, 99, 30 N. E. 482, 485 (1892) (“The work which the physician does after the vessel starts on the voyage is his and not the ship owner’s”).
- ↑ Transportation Act of 1920, §§304, 307, 41 Stat. 456; Railway Employees’ Dept., A. F. of L. v. Indiana Harbor Belt R. Co., Decision No. 982, 3 R. L. B. 332, 337 (1922).
308, 309, 218 N. Y. S. 81, 81–82 (1926); Anderson v. State Indus. Accident Comm’n, 107 Ore. 304, 311–312, 215 P. 582, 583, 585 (1923); N. Dosker, Manual of Compensation Law: State and Federal 8 (1917).
