Amazon asks SCOTUS for More Guidance on Delivery Workers’ Federal Arbitration Act Sec. 1 Exemption
By Micah Baker
The U.S. Supreme Court will soon consider hearing a case that could have a major impact on determining how and when delivery drivers are eligible for the transportation-worker exemption under the Federal Arbitration Act.
It’s a return to the issue of the extent of the FAA Sec. 1 exemption that the Court has examined—and expanded—in recent years.
The Court is scheduled to consider hearing Amazon Logistics Inc., v. Dirk Clinton, No. 26-4 (official docket available at https://bit.ly/4cY5R4n), where the issue presented, according to petitioner Amazon, is “whether a local delivery driver is engaged in interstate commerce under Section 1 of the Federal Arbitration Act solely because some of the delivered goods previously crossed state lines, without regard to a break in the goods’ transit or their local character.”
The Court originally slated the case for its so-called long conference next Monday, a week ahead of the start of the 2026-2027 Court term, but a Sept. 1 order extended the time for the respondent drivers to file a response brief to Oct. 16.
On June 29, petitioners Amazon.com Inc. and its subsidiary Amazon Logistics Inc., filed a petition for a writ of certiorari seeking review of a Jan. 7 decision by the California Court of Appeal, the state's intermediate-level court. That decision adopted a bright-line rule that the petitioners contend conflicts with recent Supreme Court precedent.
The petitioners are asking the Court to resolve a circuit split over how the FAA Sec. 1 arbitration exemption applies to workers who handle goods that take lengthy breaks between interstate and intrastate legs of their journey, and a related split over whether drivers who deliver groceries and other locally stocked goods are exempt at all.
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Amazon Flex is a mobile application that allows drivers to use their personal vehicles to make deliveries to Amazon customers. These “Delivery Partners” can choose to deliver items that are stocked, or prepared locally (groceries or other perishable items) through Amazon’s Global Specialty Fulfillment Program, or brown-box packages with items ordered from Amazon or other third-party wholesalers, manufacturers, or sellers.
Respondent Dirk Clinton, along with five other individuals, worked as Delivery Partners under the Amazon Flex Program, according to court papers. As part of the sign-up process, they agreed to the Terms of Service, which contains the following arbitration provision, according to the petitioners’ brief: “You and Amazon agree to resolve disputes between you and Amazon on an individual basis through final and binding arbitration.”
The respondents further agreed that “to the extent permitted by law, … any dispute resolution proceedings will be conducted only on an individual basis,” and not on a “class,” “collective,” or “representative basis.”
Nevertheless, the respondents filed separate suits against Amazon in multiple counties in California alleging, among other things, that Amazon willfully misclassified them as independent contractors instead of employees. These suits were then consolidated into an amended complaint.
The petitioners sought civil penalties under California’s Labor Code Private Attorneys General Act, best known as the PAGA law, “which allows employees to seek civil penalties on behalf of the State in certain circumstances for violations that they and their fellow employees experienced,” according to the petitioner.
Citing Viking River Cruises, Inc v. Moriana, 596 U.S. 639, 659 (2022), where the U.S. Supreme Court held that the FAA preempts California's rule barring agreements to arbitrate only individual PAGA claims, the petitioners moved to compel arbitration of respondents’ individual PAGA claims and to dismiss or stay the nonindividual PAGA claims, contending that the FAA required the enforcement of the parties’ arbitration agreements. The Delivery Partners responded that they were exempt from arbitration under FAA Sec. 1, 9 U.S.C. §1.
The trial court agreed with the driver-respondents and denied Amazon’s motion to compel arbitration. The fact that “‘many of the goods’ ‘were manufactured outside of California or were otherwise outside of California at some point’” made the respondents “transportation workers engaged in interstate commerce,” and thus were exempt under the wording of FAA Sec. 1.
Amazon then appealed, but moved to stay the appeal pending the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Flowers Food Inc. v. Brock, 146 S. Ct. 327 (2025). The Court of Appeals denied the petitioners’ motion to stay, then after oral arguments affirmed the lower court’s decision, denying that arbitration must be compelled.
The appellate court stated that the respondents were engaged in interstate commerce when they participated in the last-mile delivery of Amazon packages because many of the items in those packages “were manufactured outside California or otherwise originated out of state.”
The California Supreme Court denied Amazon’s petition for review. Now, the petitioners want the U.S. Supreme Court to grant plenary review for three reasons.
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First, Amazon contends that the California Court of Appeal court adopts a bright-line rule that conflicts with Flowers Foods, which expanded the reach of the FAA Sec. 1 exemption from arbitration for so-called last-mile delivery drivers. (For a report on the decision last May, background, and a link to the opinion and docket, see Caroline Hillier, “No Limit: The Supreme Court Rejects Narrowing the FAA Sec. 1 Arbitration Exemption,” CPR Speaks (May 28) (available here).)
The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected FAA Sec. 1 interpretations that make a categorical judgment about whether broad groups of workers are exempt from the FAA’s provisions for enforcing arbitration agreements. In Flowers Foods, the Amazon petition notes, when asked to resolve the question of “whether someone can qualify as a worker ‘engaged in … interstate commerce’ under §1 if he never crosses state lines and never interacts with vehicles that do,” the U.S. Supreme Court rejected use of a bright-line rule.
Instead, the Court explained that FAA Sec. 1 would only “sometimes” apply to workers who handle goods that have crossed borders and that a worker transporting goods within one state might “in certain circumstances” be engaged in interstate commerce.
Flowers Foods also emphasizes that exempt workers must play “a direct, necessary, and active” role in moving goods across borders. The Supreme Court illustrated this with a hypothetical: Vehicle A carries goods to the state line, Vehicle B drives them 10 feet across the border, and Vehicle C picks the goods up and completes the delivery within the second state. All three drivers, the Court reasoned, played a direct, active, and necessary part in a single "continuous carriage" of goods from one state to another, passing the goods along like a baton.
But in Amazon Logistics (the unpublished opinion can be found in the petitioners’ appendix filing on the U.S. Supreme Court docket page for the case at https://bit.ly/4yJxOoI), the California state appeals court applied a bright-line rule of continuous interstate commerce under FAA Sec. 1, which, according to the petitioners, is the exact kind of rule the U.S. Supreme Court has rejected.
Instead of engaging in a fact-sensitive analysis, the California Court of Appeal relies on the fact that many of the items picked up by the class of local delivery drivers “were manufactured outside California or otherwise originated out of state.” With this reasoning, Delivery Partners are exempt under FAA Sec. 11 because some of the goods handled had out-of-state origins.
As the petitioners view it, the reasoning is difficult to resolve with Flowers Foods, “which calls for a more nuanced analysis of the work performed by this class of drivers.” Most goods delivered in brown boxes had been in California for weeks before being purchased, and “were ‘at rest’ when the orders are placed.”
In fact, the records reveal a 30-day mean and 14-day median break between arriving at a California fulfillment center, being ordered by a customer, and picked up by a Delivery Partner for local delivery. Even once the order is placed, different classes of workers prepare the goods before respondents and other drivers picked them up for local delivery.
In addition, more than two-thirds of all deliveries were for items that are stocked or prepared locally, such as groceries and other perishable items. These items never had any meaningful interstate journey to begin with, the petitioners contend.
These facts beg the question of whether there was a “continuous cross-border journey.” California’s Fourth Appellate District Court of Appeal, however, sidelined these considerations, say the petitioners, relying solely on the prior transit of brown box goods across borders. Such a conclusion massively expands the FAA Sec. 1 exemption, the cert petition claims, making it “limitless.”
Quoting Supreme Court precedent, the petitioners note that “virtually all products move in interstate commerce” in the sense that they once crossed state lines. Bissonnette v. LePage Bakeries Park St., LLC, 601 U.S. 246, 256 (2024) (available at https://bit.ly/4txWaA7) (also expanding the reach of FAA Sec. 1, holding that the worker’s duties, not the industry definition, were the test of the exemption applicability).
But FAA Sec. 1, Amazon argues, is narrower. Workers performing intrastate transportation will not automatically be exempted just because they contact goods that crossed state lines. Following Flowers Foods, it is circumstantial, requiring factual analysis.
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Second, the petition argues that lower courts need further guidance on when local delivery drivers are engaged in interstate commerce.
Although Flowers Foods emphasized a series of factual issues that could be “relevant when assessing §1’s reach,” these factual issues were left unaddressed in the opinion. This was largely because the Flowers Foods petitioner framed the case narrowly, asking the Court to resolve whether crossing state lines, or interacting with a vehicle that does, is required at all. The question of how FAA Sec. 1 applies to cases like this one with meaningful breaks between interstate and intrastate journeys has split lower courts sharply, Amazon contends.
On the "break in transit" issue, the Fifth U.S Circuit Court of Appeals has refused to treat local drivers as exempt where goods had already arrived and were unloaded at a warehouse before the driver ever touched them, reasoning that such drivers "enter the scene after the goods have already been delivered across state lines."
The Ninth Circuit has gone the other way, holding in Rittmann v. Amazon.com Inc., 971 F.3d 904 (9th Cir. 2020), and again in Carmona v. Domino’s Pizza LLC, 73 F.4th 1135 (9th Cir. 2023), that any pause in transit, even one lasting weeks, is irrelevant so long as the goods didn't originate in the same state as the eventual customer. The California Court of Appeal followed the Ninth Circuit's approach in Amazon Logistics.
A similar split exists over locally stocked goods like groceries and prepared food. The First and Seventh Circuits, and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, have held that workers delivering goods stocked and sold by local retailers fall outside FAA Sec. 1, since those transactions are “not themselves within interstate commerce" just because the goods once crossed a state line at some earlier point.
The Ninth Circuit and the California state Court of Appeal has disregarded that distinction entirely, the petitioners explain, holding that a class of drivers who deliver both groceries and brown-box packages can be exempted based on the brown-box deliveries alone, without separately considering whether the grocery deliveries themselves are interstate in any real sense. Petitioners argues this entrenches, rather than resolves, exactly the confusion Flowers Foods left open.
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Third, petitioners argue that this case is an excellent vehicle to address these important issues.
Unlike in Flowers Foods, where the case reached the Supreme Court on a narrow, stipulated question, here the parties don't dispute what work Delivery Partners actually perform—only what legal significance that work carries under FAA Sec. 1. The trial court already found, as undisputed fact, that more than two-thirds of Amazon Flex deliveries in California involve locally stocked items, and that brown-box goods sit in fulfillment centers for weeks on average before being ordered. That clean factual record, Amazon argues, lets the Court decide the legal question directly.
The stakes also reach well past this case. Virtually every U.S. product sold has crossed a state line at some point in its history; if that fact alone is enough to trigger the FAA Sec. 1 exemption, the provision could swallow categories of workers Congress never intended to cover with the exemption-from-arbitration language.
This a concern the Court itself raised in Bissonnette, warning against Sec. 1 readings that would make it "limitless." Given how much of the delivery economy (Amazon Flex, DoorDash, Grubhub, Instacart, and similar platforms) runs on the same basic model of local, last-mile delivery of goods that once moved interstate, the Court's answer here would ripple far beyond Amazon alone.
There’s also a systemic cost to leaving the question unsettled. Parties agree to arbitration because it offers “lower costs” and “greater efficiency and speed” than litigating. Moreover, Congress enacted the FAA to ensure that an arbitration agreement is respected no matter the forum in which it is asserted. “Disagreement and confusion about how to interpret [FAA Sec.] 1 defeat both goals because it forces parties to undergo prolonged threshold litigation and allows plaintiffs who seek to avoid arbitration to choose the forums whose rules will let them,” the cert petition argues.
In concluding their brief, the Amazon companies ask for plenary review, which would resolve the Circuit split. But the brief provides another path: should the Court not grant full review, “at a minimum,” Amazon asks the Court to grant, vacate, and remand—GVR—the case, which would send it back to the California Court of Appeal to reconsider its decision in light of Flowers Foods, noting that the Supreme Court has followed this practice before in similar FAA Sec. 1 disputes—citing Carmona--regardless of which side an intervening decision favored.
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Respondents initially waived their right to respond to the petition, but on Aug. 18 requested the opportunity to file a response after all. A subsequent motion to extend the response deadline, was granted, and as noted above, the respondent-drivers answer is now due in the middle of next month. That is expected to extend the consideration of the case from the currently scheduled Sept. 28 conference.
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The author is the CPR Institute’s 2026-2027 academic year intern from the Howard University School of Law ADR Program in Washington, D.C., where she is a second-year student.
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