Your Arbitration Agreement May Not Cover Your Drivers, Even If They Never Leave Florida

The short answer

On May 28, 2026, a unanimous Supreme Court held that a worker who moves goods only within one state can still fall within the Federal Arbitration Act's transportation worker exemption, and therefore cannot be compelled to arbitrate under that statute. For any Florida employer whose workers move goods on a final or intermediate leg of an interstate journey, this is the most consequential arbitration decision in years.

What the Court held

In Flowers Foods, Inc. v. Brock, No. 24-935, Justice Gorsuch wrote for a unanimous Court that a worker who transports goods on an intrastate leg of an interstate journey can qualify for the exemption without crossing state lines or interacting with vehicles that do. What matters is whether the worker plays a direct and necessary role in moving goods across state lines, not whether the worker personally crosses a border.

Our take: check the goods, not the job title

The exemption has always been read to cover interstate transportation workers. What employers assumed, reasonably, was that a driver who never left the state was not one. That assumption is now wrong.

The workers this reaches are more numerous than the phrase "transportation worker" suggests: route drivers and distributors, last-mile delivery, port and airport drayage, warehouse-to-store transfer, and bakery and beverage distributors. In South Florida, where goods arrive by ship and air and are then moved locally, that is a large category.

The consequence is not merely that one arbitration agreement fails. If the exemption applies, the Federal Arbitration Act does not supply the enforcement mechanism at all, which means the agreement and any class action waiver in it may be unenforceable under federal law, and a collective action the employer thought was foreclosed is live.

The mitigation is available and most agreements do not have it. The Federal Arbitration Act is not the only arbitration statute. The Florida Arbitration Code is an independent basis for enforcement, and the exemption is a feature of the federal statute rather than a general prohibition on arbitrating these disputes. An agreement that expressly invokes Florida law as an alternative basis, with a severability clause, is in a materially better position than one that recites only the federal act. Many form agreements recite only the federal act.

We should be candid that this is not a complete answer. Whether state arbitration law can be used to enforce an agreement the federal statute exempts is itself contested, and the argument has not been definitively resolved. But an agreement that preserves the argument is better than one that does not.

What it means practically

Employers should identify which categories of workers plausibly move goods in interstate commerce, review the arbitration agreements covering them, and add an express state-law fallback with severability. This is a drafting fix, and it is cheap compared to defending a collective action that the agreement was supposed to prevent.

For an executive or a worker, the exemption is narrower than it sounds. It turns on the goods and the role, not on the label in the employment agreement.

When to call a lawyer

Before your next arbitration agreement is rolled out, and immediately on being served with a collective action by workers you assumed were bound to arbitrate.

Sources

●      Flowers Foods, Inc. v. Brock, No. 24-935 (U.S. May 28, 2026), Supreme Court slip opinion

Disclaimer

This post discusses publicly reported legal developments for general informational purposes. It is not legal advice, it does not create an attorney client relationship, and it does not reflect the firm's position in any pending matter. Outcomes depend on the specific facts and the governing law of the relevant jurisdiction.