NELP filed an amicus brief in Bissonnette v. Lepage Bakeries, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to slow the corporate assault on workers’ rights through forced arbitration.
The case is about the scope of the Section 1 exemption from the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) for transportation workers engaged in interstate commerce. Section 1 of the FAA exempts from coverage any “contracts of employment” of “seamen, railroad employees, or any other class of workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce.” Despite good arguments that the enacting Congress understood the statutory phrase “interstate commerce” to be coextensive with the Constitutional Interstate Commerce Clause, the Supreme Court has in recent years adopted a narrower definition. Workers must be engaged in “transportation work” to avoid forced arbitration.
The petitioners in Bissonnette are commercial truck drivers hired by a baked goods conglomerate, Flowers Foods, to deliver snack foods to grocery stores across Connecticut. They are clearly transportation workers, and should be entitled to have their wage and hour claims heard in court. Although the drivers do not cross state lines themselves, the goods they deliver are produced outside Connecticut, shipped to a centralized warehouse, and then picked up and transported to retail stores.
We wrote in support of the underlying claims of these commercial truck drivers, who were misclassified as independent contractors and had wages illegally withheld. Independent contractor misclassification, endemic in trucking, denies misclassified workers their basic rights. We also wrote to underline the corrosive effects of companies like Flowers shunting these claims into arbitration. Employer-imposed forced arbitration requirements are stopping workers—especially underpaid and Black workers—from taking their employers to court if they commit wage theft or violate basic labor rights.
Related to
About the Author
