160
Opinion of the Court
advocating that all time spent deadheading be classified as time on duty, and the original bill proposed in the House so provided. Ibid. The railroad industry opposed the change, however, particularly with respect to time spent deadheading from the duty site because of the operating difficulties that would result. Hearings on H. R. 8449, H. R. 84, and H. R. 9515 before the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, 91st Cong., 1st Sess., 134-135 (1969). If time spent deadheading from a duty site were to be on-duty time, railroads would have to calculate the approximate deadheading time and stop the train early enough to take account of that interval. Any miscalculation would lead to a violation of the HSA.
The enacted statute reflects a compromise in the treatment of deadhead transportation: on-duty time at the shift's beginning, limbo time at its end. The creation of limbo time solved the problem of the employee who was forced to spend much of his or her off-duty rest time in deadhead transportation, but it did so without imposing scheduling difficulties on the railroads. If we were now to classify the waiting time as on-duty, as petitioners request, we would impose on railroads the same scheduling problems that Congress sought to avoid.
Petitioners try to escape the force of the argument by attempting to fit the time at issue here within other HSA provisions. For instance, because an "interim period available for rest at a place other than a designated terminal is time on duty," 49 U. S. C. § 21103(b)(5), petitioners reason that all waiting time at a place other than a designated terminal must be time on duty. But, as we have said, interim periods available for rest occur, by definition, between periods of service for the railroad. Because the employee must return to work immediately after an interim rest period, Congress had to determine whether such a rest period would be sufficient to alleviate fatigue. Its conclusions on that score have no bearing when the time spent waiting for deadhead trans-
Page: Index Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007