Page:Helix Energy Solutions Group, Inc. v. Hewitt.pdf/18

14 the employee usually earns. See supra, at 4–5. Section 604(b) thus speaks directly to when daily and hourly rates are “[]consistent with the salary basis concept.” 69 Fed. Reg. 22184; see supra, at 5. And by doing so, the provision reinforces the exclusion of those shorter rates from §602(a)’s domain. Were §602(a) also to cover daily- and hourly-rate employees, it would subvert §604(b)’s strict conditions on when their pay counts as a “salary.” By contrast, when §602(a) is limited to weekly-rate employees, it works in tandem with §604(b). The two then offer non-overlapping paths to satisfy the salary-basis requirement, with §604(b) taking over where §602(a) leaves off.

Helix’s argument to the contrary relies on carting §604(b) off the stage. (So too the principal dissent’s, see —so we do not describe separately why that opinion is wrong.) True enough, Helix says, that §604(b) usually provides an alternative route for meeting the salary-basis requirement. See Brief for Petitioners 9–11, 46. But that is not so, Helix asserts, when highly compensated employees like Hewitt are involved. Recall that the Secretary’s regulations separately prescribe—in the “general rule” and the HCE rule—how lower- and higher-income employees satisfy the three-part standard for bona fide executive status. See supra, at 3–4. On Helix’s view, only the general rule (for lower-income workers) has two different avenues—§602(a) and §604(b)—for meeting the salary-basis test. The HCE rule, Helix argues, incorporates only §602(a); it is independent of §604(b). See Brief for Petitioners 28 (“The separate requirements of [§604] do not apply to the HCE regulation”). And with §604(b) out of the way, Helix does not have to confront (or so it says) the argument above—that it is anomalous to read §602(a) as covering daily-rate workers when that is §604(b)’s explicit function.

But to begin with, Helix could not succeed even if it were right about the (supposedly nonexistent) relationship between the HCE rule and §604(b). That is so for two reasons.