...New Prime had a problem. The FAA generally obligates courts to enforce arbitration clauses. But it expressly excludes “contracts of employment of … workers engaged in … interstate commerce,” such as “seamen” and “railroad employees.” Everyone agrees that truckers qualify for this exception. New Prime, however, asserted that truckers who work as contractors do not have “contracts of employment” and thus do not qualify. And by classifying so many workers as contractors, the company believed it had worked around the FAA’s exemption.
Not so, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the court on Tuesday. We may see a formal distinction between “employment” and contractor work today. But when Congress passed the FAA in 1925, Gorsuch explained, “Dictionaries tended to treat ‘employment’ more or less as a synonym for ‘work.’ ” Indeed, “all work was treated as employment,” whether or not “a formal employer-employee or master-servant relationship” existed. Citing six dictionaries from the era, as well as contemporaneous statutes and rulings, Gorsuch concluded that “contract of employment” was understood to encompass “work agreements involving independent contractors.” As a result, Oliveira, along with other truckers and transportation contractors, qualify for the FAA’s exemption. His class-action lawsuit may proceed in court.
Tuesday’s decision marks the triumph of the Gorsuch brief—a highly technical argument designed to nab the justice’s vote by fixating on the text of a statute and its meaning at the time of passage. Gorsuch appears to draw heavily from two sources: the brief by Public Justice, which represents Oliveira, and an amicus brief filed by the Constitutional Accountability Center, a progressive originalist law firm. These briefs dwell on the dictionaries that Gorsuch cites and even dive into the etymology of the word employment, from its Latin roots to its evolution through French and Anglo-Norman usage in the Middle Ages.
Together, Public Justice and the Constitutional Accountability Center provided enough arcane evidence to satisfy Gorsuch that, in 1925, the word employment did not distinguish between employers and contractors....
The Law and Justice Room
Reply With Quote
