The question in the case, Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote for the majority, was whether the phrase “filed any complaint” in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 applied only to written complaints.
The case arose from complaints Kevin Kasten said he made to his former employer about where it kept the time clocks that recorded the hours he worked at a Wisconsin manufacturing plant. Though workers had to wear protective gear that took time to put on and take off, the time clocks were in an area beyond the changing area.
That was, a federal judge later found in a related case, a violation of the 1938 law.
Mr. Kasten said he had complained about the practice orally to a shift supervisor and to his employer, the Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics Corporation, through its grievance procedure.
The company fired Mr. Kasten for what it said were unrelated reasons, and he sued, asserting that his dismissal was retaliation. The lower courts dismissed the suit on the ground that the 1938 law did not cover oral complaints.
Justice Breyer wrote that the word “filed” sometimes concerned oral submissions, citing dictionary definitions, regulations, court opinions and other laws. But he said the statutory text alone “cannot provide a conclusive answer to our interpretive question.”
Justice Breyer also considered Congress’s purpose in enacting the law, which he said was to address poor working conditions, including by encouraging workers to speak up without fear of being fired. Moreover, he wrote, “illiteracy rates were particularly high among the poor” in the years before the law was passed.
Limiting the law’s protection to written complaints, he went on, would frustrate the use of government hot lines and the like.
But Justice Breyer stopped short of saying that any oral complaint would do.
“A complaint must be sufficiently clear and detailed for a reasonable employer to understand it, in light of both content and context, as an assertion of rights protected by the statute and a call for their protection,” he wrote.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Sonia Sotomayor joined Justice Breyer’s opinion. Justice Elena Kagan did not participate in the case.
Justice Breyer declined to address a second argument made by the company — that the law applies only to complaints made to the government and not to private employers — because the company had failed to assert the argument adequately when the case first reached the Supreme Court.
In a dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia said he would have ruled for the company on the ground that the majority would not consider.
“The plain meaning of the critical phrase and the context,” Justice Scalia wrote for himself and Justice Clarence Thomas, “make clear that the retaliation provision contemplates an official grievance filed with a court or an agency, not oral complaints — or even formal, written complaints — from an employee to an employer.”
Justice Scalia said the argument had been properly preserved by the defendant in the case, Kasten v. Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics Corp., No. 09-834. In any event, he added, the court was free to address the question and should have.
Justice Scalia also objected to the majority’s consideration of “modern state and federal statutes” in determining the meaning to the word “filed” in the 1938 law.
“While the jurisprudence of this court has sometimes sanctioned a ‘living Constitution,’ ” Justice Scalia wrote, “it has never approved a living United States Code.”