556
Opinion of the Court
employee's job was to perform maintenance work on the employer's fleet of ferry boats, often while the boats were running: "The usual thing, of course, is for a person to have a Jones Act seaman status in relation to a particular vessel. But there is nothing about this . . . concept to limit it mechanically to a single ship." Id., at 528. There is "no insurmountable difficulty," the court explained, in finding seaman status based on the employee's relationship to "several specific vessels"—"an identifiable fleet"—as opposed to a single one. Ibid.
We, in turn, adverted to the group of vessels concept in Chandris. We described it as a rule "allow[ing] seaman status for those workers who had the requisite connection with an 'identifiable fleet' of vessels, a finite group of vessels under common ownership or control." 515 U. S., at 366. The majority in the Court of Appeals did not discuss our description of the group of vessels concept as requiring common ownership or control, nor did it discuss other Courts of Appeals cases applying the concept, see, e. g., Reeves v. Mobile Dredging & Pumping Co., 26 F. 3d, at 1258. The court pointed to this statement from Chandris: "[W]e see no reason to limit the seaman status inquiry . . . exclusively to an examination of the overall course of a worker's service with a particular employer." 515 U. S., at 371-372. It interpreted this to mean "it may be necessary to examine the work performed by the employee while employed by different employers during the relevant time period." 67 F. 3d, at 206. The court did not define what it meant by "the relevant time period." In any event, the context of our statement in Chandris makes clear our meaning, which is that the employee's prior work history with a particular employer may not affect the seaman inquiry if the employee was injured on a new assignment with the same employer, an assignment with different "essential duties" from his previous ones. 515 U. S., at 371. In Chandris, the words "particular employer" give emphasis to the point that the inquiry into the nature
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