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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday March 18 2017, @12:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the I'll-take-'Grammar-Nazi'-for-$10,000,000-Alex-... dept.

A company that refused to pay its delivery drivers overtime for years has lost its bid to be a cheapskate, to the tune of $10,000,000. The 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals (decision-pdf) interpreted an exception to OT laws with special care to a meaningful but missing comma. Specifically, the phrase existing in the statute is:
"..., packing for shipment or distribution of:"

The company wanted the phrase to be interpreted as:
"..., packing for shipment, or distribution of:"

Without the comma, the activity excluded from coverage is "packing". With the comma present, it would have excluded packing or distribution.

The law as it exists in all its commaless glory:

The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of:

(1) Agricultural produce;

(2) Meat and fish products; and

(3) Perishable foods.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 19 2017, @03:30AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 19 2017, @03:30AM (#481025)

    I think there's a small distinction (beyond paid lobbying) in that this classification of jobs include ones that result in food going to waste if it's not processed in a timely fashion, so we don't want to burden employers for trying to handle a burst in fresh produce. It's not a good rule, but I can see some hint of a justification.

    A more appropriate rule to deal with that concern might be to relax the 40-hour weekly limit to, let's say, 50 hours, but also impose a limit of 160 hours in any 4-week period -- thus encouraging employers to hire enough employees to run without routine overtime, but still giving them a little burst capacity in any given week. Relaxing the short-term limit without adding a long-term limit just encourages them to perpetually run a short-staffed for long hours.

  • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Sunday March 19 2017, @02:47PM

    by hemocyanin (186) on Sunday March 19 2017, @02:47PM (#481148) Journal

    Oakhurst is a dairy operating all the year round. It isn't like raspberries where the fruit comes ripe once a year and is very fragile. Oakhurst could easily hire the requisite number of drivers to be able to do the work it has in 40 hour chunks. That might mean having some extra trucks which costs money though, so Oakhurst would rather shift that burden to the people least able to handle it, the drivers, and make them sit in fewer trucks for an extra 12 hours per week (1.5 work days) without compensation.