Bissonnette v. LePage Bakeries Park St., LLC
The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that delivery workers can be exempt from mandatory arbitration under federal law based on what they personally do — transport goods — not what industry their employer belongs to.
The decision rejects a test several courts had used that asked whether an employer's primary business was transportation, clearing the way for bread distributors and similar workers to potentially sue in court rather than be forced into arbitration.
How it got here: A federal district court compelled arbitration; the Second Circuit affirmed on the theory that the workers were in the bakery industry; the Supreme Court took the case to resolve a split with the First Circuit.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Flowers Foods — maker of Wonder Bread and other baked goods — uses independent franchise distributors who buy the rights to deliver its products in specific territories. Neal Bissonnette and Tyler Wojnarowski owned those rights in parts of Connecticut, picking up bread from a Flowers warehouse and delivering it to local retailers, spending at least 40 hours a week doing so. When they sued Flowers for allegedly underpaying them and violating wage laws, Flowers sought to force them into private arbitration under contracts they had signed.
The question before the Court
Can workers who personally deliver goods in interstate commerce be exempt from forced arbitration under federal law, even though their employer is a bakery company rather than a transportation company?
The Court's answer
No — a worker does not have to be employed by a transportation company to qualify for the Federal Arbitration Act's exemption for transportation workers. The Court held that the key question is what the individual worker personally does: whether they are actively engaged in moving goods across interstate commerce. The Second Circuit's test — which asked whether the employer earns most of its revenue from moving goods or passengers — had no grounding in the statute's text and would force courts into expensive, discovery-intensive inquiries about a company's revenue model before deciding the basic question of whether arbitration could even be compelled.
The Court left two questions open for the lower court to resolve on remand: whether Bissonnette and Wojnarowski actually qualify as transportation workers based on the full scope of their duties (which extended beyond just driving), and whether workers who deliver only within Connecticut are "engaged in foreign or interstate commerce" as the statute requires.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Workers who spend their days delivering goods — food distributors, franchise delivery drivers, and similar workers — may be able to escape mandatory arbitration clauses and take wage disputes to court, even if their employer is a food company, retailer, or other non-transportation business. Companies that use franchise delivery arrangements will face fresh scrutiny of their arbitration agreements.
What changes now
The case goes back to the Second Circuit to decide two questions the Supreme Court left open: whether Bissonnette and Wojnarowski qualify as transportation workers given that their duties went beyond driving (they also advertised, stocked shelves, and managed accounts), and whether workers who deliver only within Connecticut are "engaged in foreign or interstate commerce" under § 1. If either question is answered against the distributors on remand, they could still be compelled to arbitrate.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether these particular bread distributors actually qualify as transportation workers, or whether delivering goods only within one state satisfies the "foreign or interstate commerce" requirement of § 1. Both questions return to the lower court and could still result in the distributors being sent to arbitration.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The case turned on § 1 of the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA), which exempts from mandatory arbitration 'contracts of employment of seamen, railroad employees, or any other class of workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce.' The Court applied *ejusdem generis* — a canon of statutory reading that limits a general term at the end of a list by the common traits of the specific examples before it — to determine who counts as part of that residual 'class of workers.'
- In its 2001 decision in *Circuit City Stores v. Adams*, the Court had used ejusdem generis to hold that § 1 covers only transportation workers, because the statute's specific examples — seamen and railroad employees — are both transportation workers. That much remained settled law; the only new question was whether a transportation worker also had to work for a transportation-industry employer.
- The Court's 2022 decision in *Southwest Airlines v. Saxon* had already answered the core framing question: the statute focuses on what individual workers do, not what their employers do generally. Saxon rejected an approach that would exempt a worker simply because she worked for an airline. The relevant inquiry is the nature of the worker's own job duties.
- Because § 1's text says nothing about the industry of the employer, the Second Circuit had to invent its own industry test from scratch — asking whether an employer 'pegs its charges chiefly to the movement of goods or passengers' and whether the 'predominant source of commercial revenue is generated by that movement.' The Court rejected this as untethered to the statute and as generating complex mini-trials about corporate revenue structures before any arbitration motion could be resolved, creating exactly the kind of litigation a pro-arbitration statute was designed to prevent.
- The Court also rejected the concern that dropping the industry requirement would sweep too broadly and exempt nearly all workers whose goods travel in interstate commerce. Under *Saxon* and *Circuit City*, a qualifying worker must be 'actively' engaged in transportation of goods 'across borders via the channels of foreign or interstate commerce' and must 'play a direct and necessary role in the free flow of goods' — a meaningfully narrow standard that would not reach ordinary retail stockers or grocery clerks.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Circuit City Stores, Inc. v. Adams (532 U.S. 105)
The Court reaffirmed that § 1's exemption is limited to transportation workers, using ejusdem generis.
Reaffirms Southwest Airlines Co. v. Saxon (596 U.S. 450)
Reaffirmed that the relevant question is what a worker personally does, not what their employer does generally.