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