California Employment Commission v. Los Angeles Down Town Shopping News Corp.

Los Angeles Down Town Shopping News, owned by the appellant corporation, is a publication devoted to the advertising of retail merchants. It has no subscribers but, without charge, regularly on Wednesday and Saturday of each week, carriers leave a paper at each dwelling house within certain designated territories. The Employment Com *423 mission (formerly the Unemployment Reserves Commission) has ruled that these carriers are employees within the meaning of the Unemployment Insurance Act (formerly the Unemployment Reserves Act, Stats. 1935, chap. 325, p. 1226, as amended; Deering’s Gen. Laws, 1935 Supp., Act 8780d, as amended) and sued the publisher for the amount assertedly due as contributions to the unemployment fund. The corporation's appeal is from a judgment in favor of the commission.

The paper has been published since 1922, and at the date • of the trial was distributed by about 1,000 boys, selected by the corporation, more than 90 per cent of whom were under 18 years of age. They had no written contract but were assigned to specific routes under an oral agreement terminable at the will of either the publisher or the carrier. Each boy was required to obtain a work permit…

I dissent. As I understand the majority opinion, it requires an employer to pay contributions and to make deductions from wages of employees in support of the unemployment fund, although such employees’ wages are less than the minimum entitling them to receive the benefits of the California Unemployment Insurance Act upon becoming unemployed. (Stats. 1935, chap. 352, p. 1226, as amended; *428 Deering’s Gen. Laws, 1935 Supp., Act 8780d, p. 2039, as amended.) I do not believe that a reasonable interpretation of this legislation sustains such a conclusion.

The act is an integrated and self-contained aggregation of rules, built one upon the other, all of which rules are phrased in certain terms, which in turn are carefully and artificially defined. Each clause of the statute must be read in the light of all the rest of the statute—most particularly in the light of the definitions.

As the 'problem is here presented, the disputed point is the identification of the “employer” who is liable for payment of contributions to the unemployment fund. In the first place, to be subject to the tax, the employer must employ individuals in the conventional legal sense; that is, the legal…