#1187 2018 · Oakhurst Dairy delivery drivers (Maine) · Labor law / food distribution
Missing one comma in a Maine overtime law cost a dairy 5 million dollars
问题
Oakhurst Dairy classified its delivery drivers as exempt from overtime pay under an ambiguously punctuated state law
背景
Maine's overtime law exempted employers from paying overtime for work involving 'the canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of' certain perishable goods. Oakhurst Dairy read that list as covering its delivery drivers, who distribute the milk but don't pack it, and had denied them overtime pay for years of shifts that regularly ran past 40 hours a week hauling dairy across the state.
In 2014, five Oakhurst drivers sued, arguing the statute didn't actually exempt them at all. Their case didn't rest on new facts about their job duties or a claim that the law was unfair — it rested entirely on how the sentence itself was constructed, and one specific piece of punctuation the legislature had left out of it.
换别人会怎么做
The drivers could have tried to argue the exemption was simply unfair or that their job didn't match its spirit, an argument that asks a court to override the legislature's clearly stated policy choice — a much harder case to win than showing the statute's own text was genuinely ambiguous on its face.
他们看到了什么
The drivers' lawyers did not need new evidence or a new argument about fairness — Maine's exemption list was missing the one comma that would have unambiguously excluded distribution-only work from the exempt category.
那一手
The drivers' lawyers argued that without a comma before 'or distribution,' the phrase 'packing for shipment or distribution' reads as a single activity — packing, whether for shipment or for distribution — not two separate exempt activities of 'packing for shipment' and 'distribution' on its own. Read that way, distribution alone was never listed as exempt, and drivers who only distributed, without packing, fell outside the exemption.
为什么管用
Courts interpreting an ambiguous statute don't get to just guess at what the legislature probably meant — they apply established canons of construction, and Maine's own drafting guide favored omitting the serial comma while state case law required genuine ambiguities in labor exemptions to be read narrowly, in favor of the worker. That combination meant the missing comma wasn't just a stylistic quirk, it was a legally load-bearing gap: once the drivers' lawyers showed the sentence supported two different readings, the tie-breaking rule of construction did the rest of the work for them, without requiring any new facts about what the drivers actually did each day.
值了多少
The First Circuit ruled the ambiguity favored the drivers, and Oakhurst Dairy settled for 5 million dollars with over 120 drivers in 2018.
什么时候会失灵
The argument only works where a genuine, defensible second reading exists and where the relevant legal system has a tie-breaking rule that favors one party when ambiguity is found — courts that instead defer heavily to legislative intent or an agency's own interpretation may resolve the same ambiguity the other way. It also invites the obvious fix: once exposed, the ambiguity gets patched by whoever drafts the next version, so the same gap can rarely be exploited twice.
后来呢
The case, widely covered as 'the Oxford comma lawsuit,' became a standard teaching example in both law schools and grammar guides for how a single punctuation mark in a statute can carry multimillion-dollar legal weight, and prompted the Maine legislature to revise the statute's punctuation and formatting to close the ambiguity going forward.
资料来源
- [1]Maine dairy drivers settle overtime case that hinged on an absent commaNPR, 2018npr.org
- [2]A lack of an Oxford comma cost dairy $5 millionCNN, 2018cnn.com