Employment – FLSA — overtime

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U.S. Supreme Court

Civil

Employment – FLSA — overtime

Pharmaceutical sales representatives are exempt from overtime under the FLSA.

Petitioners obtain nonbinding commitments from physicians to prescribe respondent’s drugs. This kind of arrangement, in the unique regulatory environment within which pharmaceutical companies operate, comfortably falls within the catchall category of “other disposition.” That petitioners bear all of the external indicia of salesmen provides further support for this conclusion. And this holding also comports with the apparent purpose of the FLSA’s exemption. The exemption is premised on the belief that exempt employees normally earn salaries well above the minimum wage and perform a kind of work that is difficult to standardize to a particular time frame and that cannot easily be spread to other workers. Petitioners—each of whom earned an average of more than $70,000 per year and spent 10 to 20 hours outside normal business hours each week performing work related to his assigned portfolio of drugs in his assigned sales territory—are hardly the kind of employees that the FLSA was intended to protect.

635 F. 3d 383, affirmed.

11-204 Christopher v. SmithKline Beecham Corp.

Alito, J.; Breyer, J., dissenting.