As the U.S. Supreme Court begins its new term, several employment-related petitions await the Court’s consideration. One of those petitions is Flower Foods v. Brock, which follows a 2024 decision by the Court and involves important implications for companies that employ “transportation workers.”
In 2024, the Supreme Court decided the case of Bissonnette v. LePage Bakeries Park Street.[1] There, distributors of Flower Foods, Inc., the country’s second largest producer of packaged bakery goods, sued the company in a putative class action for violating state and federal wage laws. Flower Foods moved to compel arbitration under the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA or “the Act”), arguing that its contracts with the distributors required the distributors to arbitrate their claims individually. While the FAA provides that arbitration agreements are generally enforceable, the Act also contains an exemption in Section 1 for “contracts of employment of seamen, railroad employees, or any other class of workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce.” Id. The question before the Supreme Court was whether a “transportation worker” must work for a company in the transportation industry to qualify for the exemption.
In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court held that there was “no such requirement.”[2] The Court reasoned that the language in Section 1 of the FAA focuses on the “performance of work” rather than the “industry of the employer.”[3] In other words, the relevant question is...
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