Cite as: 511 U. S. 571 (1994)
Opinion of the Court
Board's confidence that there is no danger of divided loyalty here. Nursing home owners may want to implement policies to ensure that patients receive the best possible care despite potential adverse reaction from employees working under the nurses' direction. If so, the statute gives nursing home owners the ability to insist on the undivided loyalty of its nurses notwithstanding the Board's impression that there is no danger of divided loyalty.
The Board also argues that "[t]he statutory criterion of having authority 'in the interest of the employer' . . . must not be read so broadly that it overrides Congress's intention to accord the protections of the Act to professional employees." Brief for Petitioner 26; see 29 U. S. C. § 152(12). The Act does not distinguish professional employees from other employees for purposes of the definition of supervisor in § 2(11). The supervisor exclusion applies to "any individual" meeting the statutory requirements, not to "any non-professional employee." In addition, the Board relied on the same argument in Yeshiva, but to no avail. The Board argued that "the managerial exclusion cannot be applied in a straightforward fashion to professional employees because those employees often appear to be exercising managerial authority when they are merely performing routine job duties." 444 U. S., at 683-684. Holding to the contrary, we said that the Board could not support a statutory distinction between the university's interest and the managerial interest being exercised on its behalf. There is no reason for a different result here. To be sure, as recognized in Yeshiva, there may be "some tension between the Act's exclusion of [supervisory and] managerial employees and its inclusion of professionals," but we find no authority for "suggesting that that tension can be resolved" by distorting the statutory language in the manner proposed by the Board. Id., at 686.
Finally, as a reason for us to defer to its conclusion, the Board cites legislative history of the 1974 amendments to other sections of the Act. Those amendments did not alter
581
Page: Index Previous 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007