Opinion ID: 4536899
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Caselaw interpreting the residual clause

Text: Before the Supreme Court’s splintered 2001 decision in Circuit City, most federal courts of appeals, including this one, held that the residual clause language of “other class of workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce” would “be given a narrow reading,” such that it should apply only to employment contracts of “any other class of workers actually engaged in the movement of goods in interstate commerce in the same way that seamen and 3 Case: 19-20258 Document: 00515429429 Page: 4 Date Filed: 05/27/2020 No. 19-20258 railroad workers are.” Rojas, 87 F.3d at 748. Uncertainty arose after Circuit City because there was no majority opinion, and the reference to this former view was not as clear as, in retrospect perhaps, it should have been. What the Supreme Court in 2001 did not do is alter the general principle that the language of being “engaged in foreign or interstate commerce” was to be given a narrow construction. Circuit City, 532 U.S. at 109. The Court concluded that because “engaged in interstate commerce” is preceded by a listing of specific occupations within the transportation industry, “railroad workers” and “seamen,” “Section 1 exempts from the FAA only contracts of employment of transportation workers.” Id. at 119. The Court did not itself define “transportation workers.” It did, though, state: “Most Courts of Appeals conclude the exclusion provision is limited to transportation workers, defined, for instance, as those workers ‘actually engaged in the movement of goods in interstate commerce.’” Id. at 112 (citation omitted). Stating what most lower federal appellate courts had done is not the same thing as stating that the Court agreed with the limitation. Justice Souter, in his dissent, though, interpreted that language as the Court’s placing its “imprimatur on the majority view among the Courts of Appeals.” Id. at 134–35 (Souter, J., dissenting). There is not unanimity among the circuits on what to make of the Supreme Court’s reference to what had been the majority view pre–Circuit City. Compare Int’l Bhd. of Teamsters Local Union No. 50 v. Kienstra Precast, LLC, 702 F.3d 954, 956 (7th Cir. 2012) (Court did place its imprimatur on the majority view), with Singh v. Uber Techs. Inc., 939 F.3d 210, 223 (3d Cir. 2019) (Court was only summarizing the prior interpretations). Regardless of other circuits’ views, the Fifth Circuit has already stated that the Supreme Court in Circuit City was adopting an interpretation “fully consistent with our reasoning in Rojas,” which is one of the cases expressing 4 Case: 19-20258 Document: 00515429429 Page: 5 Date Filed: 05/27/2020 No. 19-20258 the former majority view. Brown v. Nabors Offshore Corp., 339 F.3d 391, 394 (5th Cir. 2003). The key question in resolving the appeal before us is whether the worker needs to be engaged in the movement of goods. Though that was not the question in Brown, we did discuss it in Rojas, which this court has held remains the operative standard after Circuit City. In Rojas, we quoted favorably another circuit’s language that workers covered by the exemption are those “actually engaged in the movement of goods in interstate commerce in the same way that seamen and railroad workers are.” Rojas, 87 F.3d at 748 (quoting Asplundh Tree Expert Co. v. Bates, 71 F.3d 592, 601 (6th Cir.1995)). We now consider the parties’ arguments here. II. Whether the residual exemption applies because of a similar dispute resolution to railroad workers We first deal with some less substantial arguments. Eastus initially contends that “employees of airlines are enumerated in the Transportation Worker Exemption in the same way that railroad workers are enumerated.” This is an odd argument, because in this context “enumeration” means to list one by one, and airline workers are not on the list. Instead, for an airline worker to fall within the exemption, the airline worker must fit within the exemption’s residual clause: “any other class of workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce.” 9 U.S.C. § 1. Indeed, Eastus concedes that “employees of air carriers are not specifically mentioned in the Transportation Worker” Exemption. Eastus argues airline employees are particularly closely related to railroad workers because the two are subject to the same dispute resolution provisions of the Railway Labor Act, citing 45 U.S.C. §§ 181–188. The argument is then made that airline employees must be exempt like railroad workers. In Circuit City, the Supreme Court referred to the Railway Labor 5 Case: 19-20258 Document: 00515429429 Page: 6 Date Filed: 05/27/2020 No. 19-20258 Act, which was nearing passage as the FAA was adopted, and “assume[d] that Congress excluded ‘seamen’ and ‘railroad employees’ from the FAA for the simple reason that it did not wish to unsettle established or developing statutory dispute resolution schemes covering specific workers.” 532 U.S. at 121. We acknowledge that Congress might reasonably have excluded airline employees from the FAA for the same reason, but Congress did not add them to the list. The dispute-resolution overlap is irrelevant because we are not searching for any similarities, but only whether Eastus’ job required her to engage “in the movement of goods in interstate commerce in the same way that seamen and railroad workers are.” Rojas, 87 F.3d at 748.