Cite as: 511 U. S. 571 (1994)
Opinion of the Court
In cases involving nurses, that inquiry no doubt could lead the Board in some cases to conclude that supervisory status has not been demonstrated. The Board has not sought to sustain its decision on that basis here, however. It has chosen instead to rely on an industrywide interpretation of the phrase "in the interest of the employer" that contravenes precedents of this Court and has no relation to the ordinary meaning of that language.
To be sure, in applying § 2(11) in other industries, the Board on occasion reaches results reflecting a distinction between authority arising from professional knowledge and authority encompassing front-line management prerogatives. It is important to emphasize, however, that in almost all of those cases (unlike in cases involving nurses) the Board's decisions did not result from manipulation of the statutory phrase "in the interest of the employer," but instead from a finding that the employee in question had not met the other requirements for supervisory status under the Act, such as the requirement that the employee exercise one of the listed activities in a nonroutine manner. See supra, at 573 (listing other requirements for supervisory status). That may explain why the Board did not cite in its submissions to this Court a single case outside the health care field approving the interpretation of "in the interest of the employer" the Board uses in nurse cases. That the Board sometimes finds a professional employee not to be a supervisor when applying other elements of the statutory definition of § 2(11) cannot be shoehorned into the conclusion that the Board can rely on its strained interpretation of the phrase "in the interest of the employer" in all nurse cases. If we accepted the Board's position in this case, moreover, nothing would prevent the Board from applying this interpretation of "in the interest of the employer" to all professional employees.
We note further that our decision casts no doubt on Board or court decisions interpreting parts of § 2(11) other than the specific phrase "in the interest of the employer." Because
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