The Fair Labor Standards Act’s minimum-wage and overtime protections do not attach to a business as a whole — they attach to each employee’s own work. As the Wage and Hour Division puts it, coverage under Sections 6 and 7 “does not deal in a blanket way with industries as a whole”; instead, “it thus becomes primarily an individual matter as to the nature of the employment of the particular employee.” In practice this means some employers in an industry may have no employees covered by the Act, other employers may have some employees covered and not others, and still other employers may have every employee covered — all within the same line of business.

This individual basis exists because the statute’s own language ties coverage to the employee, not the employer: the minimum-wage requirement runs to “each of his employees who is engaged in commerce or in the production of goods for commerce,” and the overtime requirement is framed the same way. (The “commerce” prong covers work that involves the interstate movement of goods, persons, or communications. The “production” prong covers not only work that produces or handles goods intended to move in interstate commerce, but also work in a closely related process or occupation directly essential to that production — such as bookkeeping, clerical, or watchman duties that never touch the goods themselves.) Once an employee is found, after considering all relevant factors, to be engaged in covered work, the employer, too, is engaged in commerce or in the production of goods for commerce to that same extent — so the employer cannot avoid the obligation by arguing that the business itself is not “engaged in commerce or in the production of goods for commerce.”

That said, individual coverage is not decided in a vacuum. The character of the employer’s business can still be an important indication of what a particular employee’s work amounts to — this holds for either prong. On the production side specifically, the 1949 amendment to the definition of “produced” means that in some borderline situations examining the business is necessary to see whether the employee’s own occupation bears the close relationship to production for commerce that the Act requires. The employee’s own activities remain the test — the business context simply helps read them. And failing this individual test does not end the inquiry: the Act as amended also reaches employees on an “enterprise” basis, so an employee who would not be covered under the individual test discussed here may still be covered as an employee of a covered enterprise — a separate test covered later in this chapter.