Bissonnette v. LePage Bakeries Park St., LLC
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that bread delivery workers can potentially claim the Federal Arbitration Act's exemption for transportation workers, even though their employer is a bakery, not a transportation company.
The decision rejects a rule that would have required workers to prove their employer earns most of its money from moving goods — a test the Court said had no basis in the law's text and would create needless litigation.
How it got here: A federal district court compelled arbitration; the Second Circuit affirmed on the ground that the distributors worked in the bakery industry; the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case to resolve a conflict with the First Circuit.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Flowers Foods, a major national bakery, used a franchise system in which independent distributors bought rights to deliver its breads and snack cakes in specific territories. Two Connecticut distributors, Neal Bissonnette and Tyler Wojnarowski, sued Flowers for allegedly underpaying them in violation of wage laws. Flowers responded by demanding they arbitrate those claims, as their contracts required. The distributors argued federal law exempts them as transportation workers — a category not required to arbitrate under the Federal Arbitration Act.
The question before the Court
Do workers who physically deliver goods for a non-transportation company — like bread distributors working for a bakery — qualify for the federal law's exemption that lets transportation workers out of mandatory arbitration?
The Court's answer
No — a worker does not need to be employed by a transportation company to qualify for the Federal Arbitration Act's exemption for transportation workers. The law's §1 exemption asks what the worker does, not what industry the employer is in. Because the Second Circuit threw out the distributors' claim solely on the ground that their employer is a bakery rather than a transportation company, it applied a legal test that has no support in the statute's text or prior Supreme Court decisions.
The Court left open two separate questions for the lower court to address on remand: whether Bissonnette and Wojnarowski actually qualify as transportation workers based on what they do day to day, and whether their work delivering goods only within Connecticut counts as "interstate commerce" under the law. Those issues were not decided here.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Workers who physically move goods as part of their jobs — even when employed by retailers, food companies, or other non-transportation businesses — may now be able to pursue wage disputes in court rather than through mandatory arbitration. Companies can no longer point to their own industry label to push delivery-oriented workers into arbitration automatically.
What changes now
The case goes back to the Second Circuit, which must now decide two questions it did not previously address: whether Bissonnette and Wojnarowski qualify as transportation workers based on the specific work they perform, and whether their deliveries — which happen entirely within Connecticut — still count as engagement in interstate commerce under §1. Only if they clear both hurdles will they be exempt from arbitration and able to pursue their wage claims in court.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether the two distributors actually qualify as transportation workers given their broader duties (finding retail outlets, stocking shelves, managing inventory). Nor did it decide whether delivering goods only within one state satisfies §1's requirement of engagement in interstate commerce. Both questions go back to the lower court.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Federal Arbitration Act's §1 says the law does not apply to 'contracts of employment of seamen, railroad employees, or any other class of workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce.' In Circuit City (2001), the Court used the ejusdem generis canon — a reading rule that says a catchall phrase at the end of a list takes its meaning from the specific examples before it — to conclude this exemption covers only transportation workers, not all workers generally.
- In Saxon (2022), the Court went further and rejected an 'industrywide' approach, holding that whether someone is a transportation worker depends on what that individual does at their job, not what their employer does as a business. The relevant question is what the employee does at the company, not the company's general line of work.
- The Second Circuit crafted its own transportation-industry test: an employer counts as a transportation company only if it 'pegs its charges chiefly to the movement of goods' and its 'predominant source of commercial revenue' comes from that movement. This test had no grounding in the text of §1 or in any prior Supreme Court decision.
- The Court found the Second Circuit's test unworkable in practice, producing 'arcane riddles' about company finances — for example, does a pizza delivery company earn revenue mainly from pizza or from delivery? Does Amazon earn more from retail or shipping? Answering these questions could require expensive discovery just to decide a preliminary motion to compel arbitration, generating the very litigation the FAA was designed to prevent.
- The Court acknowledged that dropping the industry requirement does not make the §1 exemption limitlessly broad. Prior decisions in Circuit City and Saxon require exempt workers to be 'actively engaged in transportation of goods across borders via the channels of foreign or interstate commerce' and to 'play a direct and necessary role in the free flow of goods' across borders — limiting the exemption to an appropriately narrow group of workers.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms Circuit City Stores, Inc. v. Adams (532 U.S. 105)
Reaffirmed that §1's exemption is limited to transportation workers via the ejusdem generis reading rule.
Reaffirms Southwest Airlines Co. v. Saxon (596 U.S. 450)
Reaffirmed that the transportation-worker test focuses on what the individual does, not the employer's industry.