580
Opinion of the Court
argument that supervision of the care of patients is not in the interest of the employer. The welfare of the patient, after all, is no less the object and concern of the employer than it is of the nurses. And the statutory dichotomy the Board has created is no more justified in the health care field than it would be in any other business where supervisory duties are a necessary incident to the production of goods or the provision of services.
B
Because the Board's test is inconsistent with both the statutory language and this Court's precedents, the Board seeks to shift ground, putting forth a series of nonstatutory arguments. None of them persuades us that we can ignore the statutory language and our case law.
The Board first contends that we should defer to its test because, according to the Board, granting organizational rights to nurses whose supervisory authority concerns patient care does not threaten the conflicting loyalties that the supervisor exception was designed to avoid. Brief for Petitioner 25. We rejected the same argument in Yeshiva where the Board contended that there was "no danger of divided loyalty and no need for the managerial exclusion" for the Yeshiva faculty members. 444 U. S., at 684. And we must reject that reasoning again here. The Act is to be enforced according to its own terms, not by creating legal categories inconsistent with its meaning, as the Board has done in nurse cases. Whether the Board proceeds through adjudication or rulemaking, the statute must control the Board's decision, not the other way around. See Florida Power & Light Co. v. Electrical Workers, 417 U. S. 790, 811 (1974); cf. Packard Motor, supra, at 493 (rejecting resort to policy and legislative history in interpreting meaning of the phrase "in the interest of the employer"). Even on the assumption, moreover, that the statute permits consideration of the potential for divided loyalties so that a unique interpretation is permitted in the health care field, we do not share the
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