Page:Helix Energy Solutions Group, Inc. v. Hewitt.pdf/13

Rh salary for any week in which [he] performs any work without regard to the number of days or hours worked.” To break that up just a bit: Whenever an employee works at all in a week, he must get his “full salary for [that] week”—what §602(a)’s prior sentence calls the “predetermined amount.” That amount must be “without regard to the number of days or hours worked”—or as the prior sentence says, it is “not subject to reduction because” the employee worked less than the full week. Nothing in that description fits a daily-rate worker, who by definition is paid for each day he works and no others. Suppose (to approximate the compensation scheme here) such a worker is paid $1,000 each day, and usually works seven days a week, for a total of $7,000. Now suppose he is ill and works just one day in a week, for a total of $1,000. Is that lesser amount (as Helix argues) a predetermined, “full salary for [the] week”—or is it just one day’s pay out of the usual seven? Has the amount been paid “without regard to the number of days” he worked—or precisely with regard to that number? If ordinary language bears ordinary meaning, the answer to those questions is: the latter. A daily-rate worker’s weekly pay is always a function of how many days he has labored. It can be calculated only by counting those days once the week is over—not, as §602(a) requires, by ignoring that number and paying a predetermined amount.

In demanding that an employee receive a fixed amount for a week no matter how many days he has worked, §602(a) embodies the standard meaning of the word “salary.” At the time the salary-basis test came into effect, just as today, a “salary” referred to “fixed compensation regularly paid, as by the year, quarter, month, or week.” Webster’s New International Dictionary 2203 (2d ed. 1949); see Webster’s Third New International Dictionary 2003 (2002) (similar). “Salary” was thus “often distinguished from wages,” which denoted “[p]ay given for labor” at “short stated intervals.” Webster’s New International Dictionary, at 2203, 2863. As