(a) As orginally enacted in 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act
provided an exemption from both the minimum wage requirements of section
6 and the overtime pay requirements of section 7 which was made
applicable to ``any employee employed in the catching, taking,
harvesting, cultivating, or farming of any kind of fish, shellfish,
crustacea, sponges, seaweeds or other aquatic forms of animal and
vegetable life, including the going to and returning from work and
including employment in the loading, unloading, or packing of such
products for shipment or in propagating, processing, marketing,
freezing, canning, curing, storing, or distributing the above products
or by products thereof'' (52 Stat. 1060, sec. 13(a)(5)).
(b) In 1949 the minimum wage was extended to employees employed in
canning such products by deleting the word ``canning'' from the above
exemption, adding the parenthetical phrase ``(other than canning)''
after the word ``processing'' therein, and providing a new exemption in
section 13(b)(4), from overtime pay provisions only, applicable to ``any
employee employed in the canning of any kind of fish, shellfish, or
other aquatic forms of animal or vegetable life, or any byproduct
thereof''. All other employees included in the original minimum wage and
overtime exemption remained within it (63 Stat. 910).
(c) By the Fair Labor Standards Amendments of 1961, both these
exemptions were further revised to read as set forth in Secs. 784.100
and 784.101. The effect of this change was to provide a means of
equalizing the application of the Act as between canning employees and
employees employed in other processing, marketing, and distributing of
aquatic products on shore, to whom minimum wage protection, formerly
provided only for canning employees, was extended by this action. The
1961 amendments, however, left employees employed in fishing, in fish
farming, and in related occupations concerned with procurement of
aquatic products from nature, under the existing exemption from minimum
wages as well as overtime pay.
