562
Stevens, J., dissenting
owned by the same person.1 Particularly in a labor market designed to allow employers to rely on temporary workers for a range of jobs, there is "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." Id., at 371-372. As the Court of Appeals observed in this case: "If the type of work a maritime worker customarily performs would entitle him to seaman status if performed for a single employer, the worker should not be deprived of that status simply because the industry operates under a daily assignment rather than a permanent employment system." 67 F. 3d, at 206.
The unfairness created by the Court's rule is evident. Let us assume that none of the tugboat operators in the bay area have permanent crews and that all of them obtain their deckhands on a more or less random basis through the same hiring hall. Further, assume that about 70 percent of the work performed by the employees thus obtained is seaman's work, while the remainder is shore-based maintenance work. A typical employee working for a typical employer in that pool would have the status of a seaman, and both the employees and the employers would be aware of this reality about their work environment. But under the Court's reasoning, even if over 70 percent of his randomly selected assignments during a 2-year period were seaman assignments, an injured worker would not be a seaman for Jones Act purposes if he happened to receive only a few assignments with the owner of the particular boat on which he was injured and those assignments were not seaman's work.
1 The majority puts great weight on Chandris' description of the Fifth Circuit's case law developing the fleet doctrine as "modif[ying] the test to allow 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." Chandris, 515 U. S., at 366. See ante, at 556. But that description of the lower court's case law did not form part of the Chandris holding, and it should not control the outcome here.
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