Section 13(a)(1) of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 exempted "bona fide executive, administrative, or professional" employees from overtime pay requirements.

Employees would be considered to be paid on a salary basis if they routinely received a weekly predetermined payment that was not subject to reduction because of any variations in the "quality or quantity of the work performed."

Petitioners were sergeants, including Francis Bernard Auer, and a lieutenant employed by the St. Louis Police Department in Missouri.

They sued the respondents, members of the St. Louis Board of Police Commissioners, including David A. Robbins, and sought overtime pay that they believed was owed to them under the FLSA.

[3] Petitioners argued that they did not meet the requirements of the Secretary's salary-basis test since the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department Manual stated that their salary could be reduced for a variety of disciplinary infractions, including the quality or the quantity of work performed.

The Court held that a "one-time incident" in which disciplinary deductions were executed against one sergeant was a unique circumstance that did not defeat the salaried status of an employee.

Auer did not adopt the two-step process for review in Chevron but a single level standard of deference "to an agency's permissible interpretation of its regulation."

The proper procedure for pursuit of respondent's grievance was set forth explicitly in the APA: a petition to the agency for rulemaking.

Though he wrote the opinion of the court, Justice Scalia, in Perez v. Mortgage Bankers Ass'n, would explicitly call for Auer to be overruled.