Wonder Bread truck drivers seek exemption from mandatory arbitration

CASE PREVIEW

Bissonnette v. LePage Bakeries Park St. brings the justices yet one more case below a statute with which they’re all too acquainted – the Federal Arbitration Act. As common readers will know, the courtroom in the previous couple of many years has heard quite a few instances below the FAA. The nice majority of these instances have concerned arguments, by staff or clients, that for one purpose or one other courts shouldn’t implement a pre-dispute arbitration settlement in opposition to them. And in nearly all of these instances the justices, typically by intently divided votes, have accepted the arguments of companies to drive them into arbitration.

This case entails a unique a part of the statute, which carves out an exemption for transportation staff –particularly, for “contracts of employment of seamen, railroad workers, or another class of staff engaged in international or interstate commerce.” As a result of staff in this sort of litigation at all times favor to keep away from obligatory arbitration, staff sometimes argue that they’re transportation staff, and thus that they’re coated 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 way more receptive to the pleas of workers.

The employees on this explicit case (together with Neil Bissonnette) are industrial truck drivers, who transport packaged items manufactured by Flowers Meals, greatest identified for its manufacturing of Marvel 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 shield them from the FAA.

The drivers stand or fall on their studying of the textual content. They argue that industrial truck drivers are immediately parallel to “seamen” and “railroad workers,” a “class of staff 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 staff 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 workers.

The employers rely way 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 staff (federal maritime laws and the Railway Labor Act), laws that has no parallel for staff just like the truck drivers earlier than the courtroom. In opposition to that backdrop, the employers argue that the character of their enterprise is central to the applying of the exemption. And since they aren’t within the transportation business – however quite baking – people who transport their items can’t be transportation staff, and the exemption from the FAA can not attain them.

To deliver 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 (“staff engaged in … commerce”) needs to be interpreted as falling throughout the “similar class” as the precise examples that it follows – right here, “seamen” and “railroad workers.” As a result of seamen and railroad workers are within the transportation business, the employers argue, the courtroom shouldn’t learn the catchall to run extra broadly to succeed in staff outdoors that business.

The drivers pointedly word the odd penalties of making use of the employers’ studying in a world through 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 coated by the FAA, as a result of Amazon isn’t within the transportation business, though their opponents at Federal Specific, UPS, and the U.S. Postal Service wouldn’t.

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