WASHINGTON, DC – Following today’s decision at the Supreme Court in Flowers Foods v. Brock, a case in which the Court considered whether the Federal Arbitration Act exempts from arbitration “last-mile” delivery drivers who transport goods between two points in the same state to their final destinations, when the goods were originally shipped from outside the state, Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC) Legal Fellow Harith Khawaja issued the following statement:

In a unanimous opinion today, the Supreme Court held that last-mile transportation workers cannot be forced to arbitrate their employment disputes. The Court explained that the contemporaneous understanding of “engaged in . . . interstate commerce” covers purely local transportation workers whose intrastate route forms one part of a journey of goods from the origin in one state to the intended destination in another state. It resoundingly rejected Flowers Foods’ atextual and ahistorical argument that only workers who themselves cross state lines or directly interact with vehicles that do so qualify for the exemption.
Justice Gorsuch’s opinion for the Court quoted extensively from a dictionary that only CAC’s brief had identified—the second edition of the Cyclopedic Law Dictionary published in 1922—which explained that a “shipment from one state to another under a contract for continuous carriage is interstate commerce, even as to so much of the journey as is within the limits of a single state.” Justice Gorsuch also cited other dictionary definitions and contemporaneous case law that CAC’s brief had covered in detail.

Today’s unanimous decision is a victory for workers and opens the doors to neutral judicial fora to vindicate their claims.

Senior Appellate Counsel Smita Ghosh added:

In addition to helping workers reach federal courts, today’s unanimous decision is a victory for a text-and-history approach to the Federal Arbitration Act. The Court explained that cases using language similar to that Act’s “engaged in . . . interstate commerce” language “offer probative evidence of what an ordinary person at the time of the FAA’s enactment would have understood its terms to mean,” demonstrating how advocates can used fine-tuned textual and historical research to resist forced arbitration in future cases.