558
Opinion of the Court
Considering prior employments with independent employers in making the seaman-status inquiry would undermine "the interests of employers and maritime workers alike in being able to predict who will be covered by the Jones Act (and, perhaps more importantly for purposes of the employers' workers' compensation obligations, who will be covered by the LHWCA) before a particular work day begins." Chandris, supra, at 363. There would be no principled basis for limiting which prior employments are considered for determining seaman status. The Court of Appeals spoke of a "relevant time period" but, as noted above, it did not define this term. Since the substantial connection standard is often, as here, the determinative element of the seaman inquiry, it must be given workable and practical confines. When the inquiry further turns on whether the employee has a substantial connection to an identifiable group of vessels, common ownership or control is essential for this purpose.
Papai contends his various employers through the hiring hall would have been able to predict his status as a seaman under the Jones Act based on the seagoing nature of some of the duties he could have been hired to perform consistent with his classification as a "qualified deckhand" under the IBU Deckhands Agreement. By the terms of the agreement, Papai was qualified as a "satisfactory helmsman and lookout," for example, and he could have been hired to serve a vessel while it was underway, in which case his duties would have included "conduct[ing] a check of the engine room status a minimum of two (2) times each watch . . . for vessel safety reasons." App. 77. In South Chicago Coal & Dock Co. v. Bassett, 309 U. S. 251 (1940), we rejected a claim to seaman status grounded on the employee's job title, which also happened to be "deckhand." "The question," we said, "concerns his actual duties." Id., at 260. See also Northeast Marine Terminal Co. v. Caputo, 432 U. S. 249, 268, n. 30 (1977) (reasoning that employee's membership in longshoremen's union was, in itself, irrelevant to whether employee
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