Individual coverage under the Act’s minimum-wage and overtime-pay rules does not depend on what kind of business employs someone — it depends on what that particular employee does. There are two separate routes to coverage: an employee can be “engaged in commerce,” or an employee can be “engaged in the production of goods for commerce.” The two tests are independent. An employee who does not qualify under one may still qualify under the other, and only one is needed to bring the job under the Act.

The commerce route covers work involving or related to the movement of persons or things — including information and intelligence — among the states or between a state and a place outside it. This reaches employees working in the channels of commerce itself, and also employees whose activities are so closely related to that commerce, as a practical matter, that they should be considered a part of it. Merely “affecting” commerce is not enough. Typical examples include the telephone, transportation, and shipping industries, along with banking, insurance, and newspaper publishing, which regularly use the channels of interstate commerce. A warehouse employee handling goods that cross state lines qualifies, and so does an employee who, as a regular and recurrent part of the job, uses the mail or telephone to send or receive orders, reports, or messages across state lines.

The production route asks three separate questions: (1) is there “production” — producing, manufacturing, mining, handling, or otherwise working on something; (2) is that production of “goods”; and (3) is the production “for commerce”? An employee who is actually producing, manufacturing, mining, handling, or otherwise working on the goods is covered on that basis alone. The “closely related and directly essential” standard is a separate path for employees who are not themselves producing or working on the goods — their work must be both closely related to, and directly essential for, producing goods for interstate commerce, not one or the other alone. Coverage is not limited to employees who physically touch the product or work inside the factory or warehouse where it is made, though who employs the worker affects how the “closely related and directly essential” test is applied, not what it asks. An employee working at the very place where the goods are produced is covered unless the employer can show the job’s functions are so definitely segregated from that production that they should not be regarded as closely related and directly essential to it — a showing that either element is missing is enough, not that both must be. For that same work, the same principles decide coverage whether the person performing it is the producer’s own employee or the employee of an independent employer performing the work on the producer’s behalf. When an independent employer is involved, the analysis adds one further factor: the nature and purpose of the intermediary’s business, and how essential the work is to the producer, judged by the totality of the circumstances (all relevant factors considered together). Under § 776.19(a)(3), that added factor proves decisive mainly where the employee’s work, though already directly essential to the producer’s operations, sits close to the line between work that counts as directly essential and work that does not.