Justices exempt bakery-truck drivers from arbitration requirement

The justices on Friday dominated in favor of a bunch of truck drivers who transport items for Marvel Bread of their arbitration dispute. Bissonnette v. LePage Bakeries Park St. is one other of the courtroom’s quite a few circumstances decoding the Federal Arbitration Act’s command that courts implement obligatory pre-dispute arbitration agreements. Bissonnette includes an exception from the FAA for any “class of employees engaged in overseas or interstate commerce,” and the query in Bissonnette  is whether or not that exception activates the character of the work the staff do or as a substitute on the character of their employer’s enterprise. The employees right here drive supply vans, carrying (amongst different issues), Marvel Bread. They argue that they’re transportation employees, as a result of they drive vans for a dwelling; the employers argue that they don’t seem to be, as a result of they work within the bakery {industry}.

Friday’s resolution in favor of the employees got here in a brief unanimous opinion from Chief Justice John Roberts. Roberts began by stating that the courtroom all the time has restricted the exemption to “transportation employees,” reflecting the courtroom’s view that the “normal phrase ‘class of employees engaged in … commerce’ is managed and outlined by reference to the precise classes ‘seamen’ and ‘railroad workers’ that precede it.”

He then famous that the courtroom’s most up-to-date resolution within the space (involving baggage handlers for Southwest Airways) “expressly declined to undertake an ‘industry-wide’ method of the type [the employers] advance right here,” largely as a result of the statute’s “language focuses on the efficiency of labor slightly than the {industry} of the employer.” Pointing to the examples of Amazon and Walmart – “which each promote merchandise of their very own and transport merchandise bought by third events” – Roberts sugggested that figuring out whether or not any specific employer is within the transportation {industry} usually can be fact-intensive, requiring “[e]xtensive discovery” and “[m]ini-trials” that may make FAA litigation unacceptably “gradual” and “costly.”

Lastly, Roberts rejected the argument (mentioned with some curiosity by Justice Brett Kavanaugh on the oral argument) that the exemption needs to be restricted to a specific {industry} as a result of the references within the statute to “seamen” and “railroad workers” matched industry-specific regulatory techniques that had been in place when Congress adopted the FAA in 1925. Roberts dismissed that argument out of hand, emphasizing how “unusual” it will be “to learn the conspicuous absence of … industry-specific language in § 1 as an indication that Congress outlined the exemption on an industrywide foundation.”

In sum, Roberts concluded, “[a] transportation employee needn’t work within the transportation {industry} to fall throughout the exemption from the FAA.” Accordingly, the courtroom unanimously reversed the opposite resolution of the courtroom of appeals.