Section 13(b)(4) exempts any employee employed in the canning of
aquatic forms of animal or vegetable life or byproducts thereof from the
overtime requirements of the Act. As previously stated, it was made a
limited exemption by the Fair Labor Standards Amendments of 1949. The
legislative history of this section in specifically explaining what
types of activities are included in the term ``canning'' and the
antecedents from which this section evolved make it clear that the
exemption applies to those employees employed in the activities that
Congress construed as being embraced in the term and not to all those
engaged in the fish canning industry (Mitchell v. Stinson, 217 F. 2d
214). Congress defined Report No. 1453, 81st Cong., first session 95
Cong. Rec. 14878, 14932-33) as follows:
Under the conference agreement ``canning'' means hermetically
sealing and sterilizing or pasteurizing and has reference to a process
involving the performance of such operations. It also means other
operations performed in connection therewith such as necessary
preparatory operations performed on the products before they are placed
in bottles, cans, or other containers to be hermetically sealed, as well
as the actual placing of the commodities in such containers. Also
included are sebsequent operations such as the
labeling of the cans or other cases or boxes whether such subsequent
operations are performed as part of an uninterrupted or interrupted
process. It does not include the placing of such products or byproducts
thereof in cans or other containers that are not hermetically sealed as
such an operation is ``processing'' as distinguished from ``canning''
and comes within the complete exemption contained in section 13(a)(5).
Of course, the processing other than canning, referred to in the last
sentence quoted above, is now like canning, in section 13(a)(5).
