SCOTUS: Drivers outdoors transportation trade could also be exempt from arbitration

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Dive Transient:

• Transportation employees needn’t work within the transportation trade to qualify for the Federal Arbitration Act’s exemption of employees engaged in overseas or interstate commerce from contractual agreements that compel arbitration, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Courtroom held Friday.
• Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in Bissonnette v. LePage Bakeries that the FAA accommodates no such requirement. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Courtroom of Appeals erred, he mentioned, when it compelled truck drivers delivering baked items for Flowers Meals to arbitrate their wage-and-hour claims in opposition to the corporate on the idea that the drivers labored within the bakery trade, reasonably than the transportation trade.
• The excessive court docket vacated and remanded the 2nd Circuit’s choice, however Roberts mentioned the court docket didn’t specific an opinion on “any different grounds in favor of arbitration” raised in decrease courts. That features arguments that the drivers weren’t engaged in overseas or interstate commerce as a result of they delivered baked items solely in Connecticut.

Dive Perception:

The Supreme Courtroom has issued a number of opinions associated to arbitration within the employment context over the previous couple of years, and its choice in Bissonnette provides to the pile.

In oral arguments lower than two months in the past, counsel for Flowers Meals argued that the excessive court docket’s 2021 Southwest Airways Co. v. Saxon choice supported its place that the drivers couldn’t be thought of transportation employees beneath the FAA. Saxon handled an airline employee whose job concerned loading and unloading cargo from airplanes, which the court docket held was coated by the FAA’s exemption.

However in deciding Saxon, the court docket construed the FAA’s exemption of employees “engaged” in overseas or interstate commerce to concentrate on the efficiency of labor, reasonably than the particular trade wherein the work is carried out, Roberts mentioned Friday. The FAA’s statute, he continued, “says nothing to direct courts to think about the trade of a employee’s employer. The related query was ‘what [Saxon] does at Southwest, not what Southwest does usually.’”

Flowers had argued that deciphering the FAA’s statute with out an implied transportation trade requirement would “sweep too broadly,” however the court docket disagreed. Roberts mentioned that the court docket’s precedent in Saxon and the 2001 case Circuit Metropolis Shops, Inc. v. Adams exhibits that “any exempt employee ‘should not less than play a direct and ‘crucial function within the free movement of products’ throughout borders.’”