On May 28, 2026, the Supreme Court unanimously held in Flowers Foods, Inc. v. Brock that workers transporting goods within one state’s borders, as part of an interstate journey, qualified for the Federal Arbitration Act’s (FAA) exemption for workers “engaged in … interstate commerce.” The decision resolved a lingering issue about the scope of the FAA exemption, and clarified that last-mile delivery drivers will, in many cases, not be required to arbitrate claims one-by-one under the FAA.

The FAA was originally enacted in 1925 to clarify procedural rules that apply to business-to-business pre-dispute arbitration provisions. In the last few decades, the Supreme Court issued a series of decisions interpreting the FAA as generally requiring the enforcement of forced arbitration provisions and class action waivers unilaterally drafted and imposed by corporations on workers and consumers. But there is a key exception: Section 1 of the FAA exempts “contracts of employment” of “any [] class of workers engaged in . . . interstate commerce” from compelled enforcement.

Prior to its decision in Brock, the Court addressed the scope of the Section 1 exemption on several other occasions. In New Prime Inc. v. Oliveira, 586 U. S. 105 (2019), it held that the exemption of “contracts of employment” was not limited to statutory employees in the modern sense, but included contracts governing independent contractors. In Southwest Airlines Co. v. Saxon, 596 U. S. 450 (2022), it held that an...

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