In the last few weeks, two different federal appeals courts have ruled that drivers using Amazon’s app-based delivery program, AmazonFlex (or AmFlex), are exempt from the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) and thus cannot be compelled to arbitrate disputes based on arbitration agreements that they entered into with the company.
Even though the U.S. Supreme Court has issued a long line of decisions in recent years generally endorsing the strong federal policy favoring arbitration, there are limits, often centered on a provision in the FAA that exempts “contracts of employment of … workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce.”
A central question in whether the transportation exemption applies is whether the workers are “engaged in foreign or interstate commerce.” In the two recent appeals court rulings at issue here, each court – the First Circuit in Waithaka v Amazon.com, Inc. , No. 19-1848 (1st Cir. July 17, 2020), and the Ninth Circuit in Rittmann v. Amazon.com, Inc. , No. 19-35381 (9th Cir. August 19, 2020) – gave a broad reading to the exemption by applying it to drivers that Amazon contracts with in some jurisdictions to make “last mile” deliveries.
Members of the Center for Workplace Compliance (CWC) can read more here.