In the

United States Court of Appeals

For the Seventh Circuit ____________________

No. 19-1703

LEONID BURLAKA, et al.,

Plaintiffs-Appellants,

v.

CONTRACT TRANSPORT SERVICES LLC,

Defendant-Appellee.

____________________

Appeal from the United States District Court for the

Eastern District of Wisconsin.

No. 1:17-cv-1126 — William C. Griesbach, Judge.

____________________

ARGUED SEPTEMBER 18, 2019 — DECIDED AUGUST 21, 2020

____________________

Before KANNE, HAMILTON, and BARRETT, Circuit Judges.

BARRETT, Circuit Judge. Leonid Burlaka, Timothy Keuken, 

Travis Frischmann, and Roger Robinson are truck drivers 

who brought individual, collective, and class action claims 

against Contract Transport Services (CTS), their former employer, for failing to provide overtime pay in violation of the 

Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), which requires overtime 

pay for any employee who works more than forty hours in a 

workweek. 29 U.S.C. § 207(a)(1). The entitlement to overtime
2 No. 19-1703

pay, however, is not absolute: as relevant here, the statute exempts employees who are subject to the Secretary of Transportation’s jurisdiction under the Motor Carrier Act (MCA). 

29 U.S.C. § 213(b)(1). This carveout is known as the “MCA exemption,” and its rationale is safety. It is dangerous for drivers to spend too many hours behind the wheel, and “a requirement of pay that is higher for overtime service than for 

regular service tends to ... encourage employees to seek” 

overtime work. Levinson v. Spector Motor Serv., 330 U.S. 649, 

657 (1947).1

The viability of these claims therefore depends on whether 

the plaintiffs are subject to the jurisdiction of the Secretary of 

Transportation, which extends “over transportation by motor 

carrier and the procurement of that transportation, to the extent that passengers, property, or both[] are transported by 

motor carrier ... between a place in ... a State and a place in 

another State.” 49 U.S.C. § 13501(1)(A). Importantly, drivers 

need not actually drive in interstate commerce to fall within 

the Secretary’s jurisdiction. As the Department of Transportation has explained through a notice of interpretation, the

MCA exemption applies even to drivers who have not driven 

in interstate commerce so long as they are employed by a carrier that “has engaged in interstate commerce and that the 

driver could reasonably have been expected to make one of 

the carrier’s interstate runs.” Application of the Federal Motor 

Carrier Safety Regulations, 46 Fed. Reg. 37,902, 37,903 (July 

23, 1981). 

1 The plaintiffs also asserted claims under Wisconsin law, which 

tracks both the federal overtime pay requirement and the MCA exemption. See WIS. ADMIN. CODE DWD § 274.04(4). We will focus on the federal 

law claims because the same analysis applies to both. 
No. 19-1703 3

The scope of an interstate commerce run under the MCA

is generous. It includes a purely intrastate run so long as it is 

a part of a continuous interstate journey. See Collins v. Heritage 

Wine Cellars, Ltd., 589 F.3d 895, 898 (7th Cir. 2009). This continuity is not broken by routine interruptions that “are no more 

than the normal stops or stages that are common in interstate 

sales.” Id. As the Court explained in Walling v. Jacksonville Paper Co., “if the halt in the movement of the goods is a convenient intermediate step in the process of getting them to their 

final destinations, they remain ‘in commerce’ until they reach 

those points.” 317 U.S. 564, 568 (1943). 

With the statutory scheme in mind, we turn to the facts. 

CTS is a Wisconsin-based motor carrier company that provides truckload transportation services for client companies 

primarily in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, and Michigan. It employs drivers that provide both over-the-road services—transportation of clients’ goods over long distances 

(up to 500 miles) within and across state lines—as well as yard 

management and spotting services—transportation of loaded 

and empty trailers over short distances among and within clients’ facilities. 

CTS contends that the scope of the plaintiffs’ employment 

included over-the-road driving—which matters because 

merely being subject to over-the-road assignments would be 

enough to render the plaintiffs subject to the MCA exemption. 

According to CTS, all of its drivers are hired for the same position, and although some are assigned to spotting duties, all 

drivers can be called on to perform any driving assignment. 

That is why, CTS explains, it requires all drivers to hold commercial driver’s licenses and to comply with the same Federal 

Motor Carrier Safety Regulation requirements. The plaintiffs, 
4 No. 19-1703

on the other hand, insist that they asked to be assigned only 

to spotting duties and that CTS, respecting that request, did 

not reprimand them for turning down over-the-road assignments. Thus, they say, longer hauls were not actually within 

the scope of their employment.

If CTS is right, the case ends there. But the factual dispute 

about whether the plaintiffs were reasonably expected to 

drive across state lines makes that question one for a jury. So 

we will focus instead on the connection between the plaintiffs’ 

spotting duties and the interstate shipment of the goods they 

carried. If the undisputed facts establish that the plaintiffs 

could be reasonably expected to drive intrastate routes that 

were part of a continuous interstate journey, then the MCA 

exemption applies.

During the relevant period, all of the plaintiffs performed

spotting duties for Green Bay Packaging, one of CTS’s clients. 

The plaintiffs were assigned to two of Green Bay Packaging’s 

Wisconsin-based corrugated box manufacturing facilities: 

Green Bay Shipping Container and De Pere Shipping Container. As spotters, the plaintiffs drove loaded and empty 

trailers either within these facilities (to loading docks) or to 

nearby locations, where they drove short routes on public 

roads. The public route at the De Pere location connected the 

De Pere Container to the De Pere Folding Carton, and the 

public routes at the Green Bay location connected the Green 

Bay Container to three warehouses (Warehouse 3, Warehouse 

6, and Quincy Warehouse) and a drop lot across the street 

from the Green Bay Container. The plaintiffs were assigned to 

these routes indiscriminately—in other words, they could be 

expected to drive any of the routes.
No. 19-1703 5

After the spotters dropped off their trailers at these dropoff locations, the trailers were picked up by different drivers 

for delivery either within or outside Wisconsin. To show that 

the trailers driven by the plaintiffs were among those used to 

make out-of-state deliveries, CTS introduced Green Bay Packaging’s bills of lading. These bills—which track the trailers’ 

identification numbers, pick-up locations at Green Bay Packaging facilities, out-of-state delivery locations, and delivery 

dates—show that some of the trailers dropped off by the 

plaintiffs were used shortly thereafter (usually within a few 

days) to deliver goods across state lines. The record reflects

that approximately 20% of the goods that passed through 

Green Bay were either coming from or destined for a different 

state. At De Pere, the same was true for between 24% and 54% 

of the goods. And the handwritten notes on the bills of lading 

show that at least some of these interstate goods passed 

through the relevant warehouses.

These facts plainly demonstrate that at least some spotters 

drove trailers carrying finalized goods destined for out-ofstate delivery. Such a service, even if purely intrastate and interrupted briefly, would nevertheless constitute “driving in 

interstate commerce” because it would be part of the goods’

continuous interstate journey. See Collins, 589 at 898; see also

Walling, 317 U.S. at 568 (defining shipment in interstate commerce as the “practical continuity of movement of the 

goods”). And while some of the plaintiffs’ runs may have 

been purely local, the sheer volume of the interstate commerce through these facilities, combined with the fact that the 

plaintiffs were assigned to their spotting duties indiscriminately, demonstrates that the plaintiffs had a reasonable 

chance of being called upon to make some drives that were 

part of a continuous interstate journey. See Morris v. McComb, 
6 No. 19-1703

332 U.S. 422, 423 (1947) (holding that the exemption applies to 

drivers of a carrier that only devoted approximately 4% of its 

total services to interstate commerce and distributed its interstate assignments indiscriminately).

The plaintiffs make several weak attempts to undermine 

this conclusion. First, they argue that as spotters, they were 

not likely to be given over-the-road assignments. Thus, they 

claim, there was only a “remote” chance that they’d be sent 

on interstate runs. See Johnson v. Hix Wrecker Serv., Inc., 651 

F.3d 658, 663 (7th Cir. 2011). This argument is wholly unpersuasive. As we have already explained, the plaintiffs can fall 

within the MCA exemption even if they were not expected to 

take over-the-road assignments. The question is whether the 

plaintiffs’ spotting duties were part of the interstate journey 

of the goods. If they were, the MCA exemption applies. When 

both over-the-road drivers and spotters take part in the interstate journey of the goods, both services affect “safety of operation of an interstate motor carrier.” Levinson, 330 U.S. at

668.

The plaintiffs also argue that any link between their spotting services and the interstate shipment is too attenuated to 

form a continuous interstate journey. They emphasize that the 

interstate shipment process entailed several steps between the 

initial spotting and the eventual delivery of the goods across 

state lines. These steps included rotation among the drivers, 

stops at different locations such as warehouses, and potential 

unloading and reloading. But the existence of intermediary 

steps does not sever the connection between the plaintiffs’ 

driving and the ultimate interstate movement of the goods. 

None amounted to anything other than “interruptions in the 

journey that ... are no more than the normal stops or stages 
No. 19-1703 7

that are common in interstate sales.” Collins, 589 F.3d at 898.2

The plaintiffs seem to imagine that a continuous journey must 

resemble a relay race, in which the next driver immediately 

picks up exactly where the other left off. But that is neither 

how interstate shipments work nor what the MCA requires. 

Because the evidence establishes that plaintiffs were subject to performing spotting duties that comprised one leg of a 

continuous interstate journey, the district court’s grant of 

summary judgment is AFFIRMED.

2 Plaintiffs also try to sever this link by noting that sometimes the trailers driven by Robinson contained cardboard that needed to be processed 

into finished boxes prior to being shipped to customers. They argue that 

this process of transforming the cardboard into the finalized products interrupted the continuous interstate journey. See Goldberg v. Faber Indus., 

Inc., 291 F.2d 232, 234 (7th Cir. 1961). As CTS correctly points out, the 

plaintiffs did not raise this argument before the district court. Thus, this 

argument is forfeited.