Wonder Bread truck drivers seek exemption from mandatory arbitration

The justices’ February session will start on Tuesday, Feb. 20. (Christina B Castro by way of Flickr)

Bissonnette v. LePage Bakeries Park St. brings the justices one more case beneath a statute with which they’re all too acquainted – the Federal Arbitration Act. As common readers will know, the court docket in the previous couple of a long time has heard quite a few circumstances beneath the FAA. The good majority of these circumstances have concerned arguments, by employees or prospects, that for one cause or one other courts shouldn’t implement a pre-dispute arbitration settlement in opposition to them. And in nearly all of these circumstances the justices, usually by intently divided votes, have accepted the arguments of companies to drive them into arbitration.

This case includes a unique a part of the statute, which carves out an exemption for transportation employees –particularly, for “contracts of employment of seamen, railroad staff, or some other class of employees engaged in international or interstate commerce.” As a result of employees in such a litigation all the time favor to keep away from necessary arbitration, employees usually argue that they’re transportation employees, and thus that they’re lined by the exemption, in order that the FAA doesn’t drive them into arbitration. In that context, specializing in the language of the exemption, the justices have been far more receptive to the pleas of staff.

The employees on this explicit case (together with Neil Bissonnette) are industrial truck drivers, who transport packaged items manufactured by Flowers Meals, finest recognized for its manufacturing of Surprise Bread. When Bissonnette (amongst others) filed a category motion lawsuit in opposition to Flowers and LePage Bakeries, a Flowers distributor, Flowers and LePage argued that the FAA compelled arbitration (which might vitiate the category motion).

The decrease courts agreed, reasoning that as a result of the truck drivers don’t work within the transportation business, the exemption doesn’t defend them from the FAA.

The drivers stand or fall on their studying of the textual content. They argue that industrial truck drivers are instantly parallel to “seamen” and “railroad staff,” a “class of employees engaged in … commerce,” only a completely different mode of commerce than sea or rail. Notably, as a result of the statute refers to a “class of employees engaged in … commerce,” the drivers argue that the traits of their employer are irrelevant. All that issues is that the employees themselves are engaged within the interstate transportation of products, similar to seamen and railroad staff.

The employers rely far more on the background of the FAA and of the exemption. Their temporary begins with a prolonged historic argument that the motivation for the exemption was a set of separate regulatory regimes defending seamen and railway employees (federal maritime laws and the Railway Labor Act), laws that has no parallel for employees just like the truck drivers earlier than the court docket. Towards that backdrop, the employers argue that the character of their enterprise is central to the appliance of the exemption. And since they aren’t within the transportation business – however relatively baking – those who transport their items can’t be transportation employees, and the exemption from the FAA can not attain them.

To carry that contextual argument into the phrases of the statute, the employers depend on the interpretive canon of “eiusdem generis,” a maxim the justices beforehand have used to interpret this similar statute. The rule of eiusdem generis counsels {that a} catchall on the finish of a phrase (“employees engaged in … commerce”) ought to be interpreted as falling inside the “similar class” as the precise examples that it follows – right here, “seamen” and “railroad staff.” As a result of seamen and railroad staff are within the transportation business, the employers argue, the court docket shouldn’t learn the catchall to run extra broadly to succeed in employees exterior that business.

The drivers pointedly word the odd penalties of making use of the employers’ studying in a world by which retailers like Amazon and Walmart function multinational supply networks. To take the employers at their phrase, all of the truck drivers for Amazon could be lined by the FAA, as a result of Amazon shouldn’t be within the transportation business, though their opponents at Federal Categorical, UPS, and the U.S. Postal Service wouldn’t.

The justices have loads of expertise with the FAA, so my guess is that they’ll get fairly shortly to the purpose within the argument on Tuesday and that we’ll have an excellent line on the end result by the top of the argument. You’ll hear extra from me then.