Cite as: 517 U. S. 392 (1996)
Opinion of the Court
able interpretations. Courts, in turn, must respect the judgment of the agency empowered to apply the law "to varying fact patterns," Bayside, 429 U. S., at 304, even if the issue "with nearly equal reason [might] be resolved one way rather than another," id., at 302 (citing Farmers Reservoir, 337 U. S., at 770 (Frankfurter, J., concurring)). We note, furthermore, that administrators and reviewing courts must take care to assure that exemptions from NLRA coverage are not so expansively interpreted as to deny protection to workers the Act was designed to reach. See 48 F. 3d, at 1370 (citing NLRB v. Cal-Maine Farms, Inc., 998 F. 2d 1336, 1339 (CA5 1993)); 6 cf. Arnold v. Ben Kanowsky, Inc., 361 U. S. 388, 392 (1960) (exemptions from the FLSA "are to be narrowly construed against the employers seeking to assert them"); Mitchell v. Kentucky Finance Co., 359 U. S. 290, 295 (1959) ("It is well settled that exemptions from the Fair Labor Standards Act are to be narrowly construed.").
III
Primary farming includes the raising of poultry. See Bayside, 429 U. S., at 300-301. All agree that the independ-6 The legislative history suggests that Congress, in linking the definition of "agricultural laborer" in NLRA § 2(3) to § 3(f) of the FLSA, intended to cabin the exemption. The version of the appropriations rider first adopted by the House incorporated the definition of "agricultural laborer" contained in the Social Security Act Amendments of 1939, 53 Stat. 1377. See 92 Cong. Rec. 6689-6692 (1946). Some lawmakers, however, objected that the amendment contained a "very broad definitio[n] of agricultural laborer excluding a great number of processing employees" from NLRA coverage. See id., at 9514 (statement of Sen. Ball). After some debate— and upon consultation with a Board member and Board counsel—the Conference Committee agreed to substitute the "much narrower definition" supplied by § 3(f) of the FLSA. See ibid. The dissent's reading of § 3(f), while a plausible construction of a text we, the Board, and the Secretary of Labor find less than crystalline, see infra, at 409, is inharmonious with a congressional will to create a slim exemption from the encompassing protection the NLRA and the FLSA afford employees in our Nation's commercial enterprises.
399
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