Tenth Circuit Transportation Worker Exemption Turns on the Class, Not the Claimant

The Tenth Circuit transportation worker exemption analysis now runs through the job, not the person holding it. In Joyner v. Frontier Airlines, Inc., No. 25-1211, a published decision issued on 1 September 2026 and picked apart by the defense bar in the analyses that appeared on 23 September, the court reversed an order denying two motions to compel arbitration because the District of Colorado had decided whether three airport customer service agents were exempt from the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) by looking at what those three agents actually did, rather than at what their class of workers typically does.

That distinction is not academic housekeeping. Section 1 of the FAA exempts "contracts of employment of seamen, railroad employees, or any other class of workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce." The statutory unit is the class. A court that resolves the question on the named plaintiffs' own timesheets is answering a different question from the one Congress asked, and — as Joyner shows — it can get a different answer.

What did the Tenth Circuit decide in Joyner v. Frontier Airlines?

The Tenth Circuit held that the district court erred by defining the relevant class of workers too narrowly, focusing on the work the three named plaintiffs personally performed instead of the work typically performed by the class to which they belong, and it reversed the denial of the motions to compel arbitration and remanded for the attributes of that class to be determined under the correct standard.

The panel was Judges Tymkovich, Murphy and Bacharach, with Judge Murphy writing. The decision is published, so it binds district courts in Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah and Wyoming, and it is precedential authority for every employer in the circuit that has been compelled to litigate rather than arbitrate an airport, warehouse or last-mile wage claim on the strength of a named-plaintiff record.

Two things the court did not do are as important as what it did. It did not hold that airport customer service agents fall outside Section 1. And it did not order arbitration. It sent the question back to be asked properly, which means the agents may yet be held exempt — on a record built around the class rather than around three people.

How the case reached the Tenth Circuit

Chiquita Joyner, Helen Dixon and Tajahne Hobley worked as customer service agents at Denver International Airport for Simplicity Ground Services, LLC and Aircraft Service International, Inc., both trading as Menzies Aviation, servicing Frontier Airlines, Inc. In May 2024 they filed a putative Class Action in the District of Colorado, docketed as No. 1:24-CV-01672-SKC-TPO, asserting claims under Colorado's wage-and-hour statutes.

The allegations are the ordinary currency of shift-work litigation: that the companies deducted time for meal breaks the agents never received, required them to work through mandatory rest breaks, failed to pay overtime, and withheld earned sales commissions. Nothing about the underlying claims is doctrinally interesting. What made the case an appellate vehicle was the Arbitration Agreement in the agents' employment contracts.

Menzies and Frontier each filed a Motion to Compel Arbitration, invoking both the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) and Colorado law. The agents answered that they were transportation workers and therefore members of a "class of workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce" excluded from the FAA's reach by Section 1.

The district court held an evidentiary hearing — itself worth noting, because arbitrability disputes are more often resolved on declarations — and found that the three agents "actually and routinely" handled passengers' luggage and performed a "gatekeeping" function with respect to cargo. On that basis it concluded they were exempt transportation workers and denied both motions. The employers took an interlocutory appeal, as Section 16 of the FAA permits from an order denying a motion to compel.

How do courts define the "class of workers" under FAA Section 1?

Under Joyner, the class of workers is defined by the work the class typically performs, identified from the job itself rather than from the individual duties of whichever employees happen to have filed suit. The Supreme Court framed the inquiry in Southwest Airlines Co. v. Saxon, 596 U.S. 450 (2022), which asked whether the claimant belonged to "any class of workers directly involved in transporting goods across state or international borders" — a formulation that fixes attention on a category of labor, not on a personnel file.

The practical consequence is a shift in what counts as evidence. A record assembled to show that three particular agents lifted bags on particular shifts is the wrong record. The right record describes the position: the written job description, the station's staffing model and task allocation, training materials, the collective share of time the role devotes to baggage and cargo functions, and whether the duties said to be transportation work are core to the role or incidental to it and unevenly distributed across the workforce.

That cuts both ways, and claimants' counsel should not read Joyner as a defense decision. If the typical customer service agent at a large hub spends a substantial part of the shift moving checked baggage into the interstate stream, the class-level inquiry makes that easier to establish than a plaintiff-by-plaintiff showing — and it insulates the result from the argument that the named plaintiffs are unrepresentative. The rule is neutral. What it punishes is a record built at the wrong altitude.

Four decisions in five years: Saxon, Bissonnette, Flowers Foods and Joyner

Section 1 was a quiet corner of the FAA for two decades after Circuit City Stores, Inc. v. Adams, 532 U.S. 105 (2001), read the residual clause to cover transportation workers rather than employment contracts generally. It has been anything but quiet since 2022.

Decision	Date	What it held	What it added
Southwest Airlines Co. v. Saxon, 596 U.S. 450	2022	An airline ramp supervisor who frequently loaded and unloaded cargo belonged to a class of workers engaged in interstate commerce	Fixed the inquiry on a "class of workers directly involved in transporting goods across state or international borders"
Bissonnette v. LePage Bakeries Park St., LLC, 601 U.S. ___	12 April 2024	Bakery distributors could be exempt transportation workers	Removed any requirement that the employer be in the transportation industry
Flowers Foods, Inc. v. Brock, 608 U.S. ___	28 May 2026	A distributor who never crossed state lines was exempt because his intrastate route formed a constituent part of the goods' interstate journey	Rejected a bright-line state-line-crossing test; unanimous, Gorsuch, J., affirming the Tenth Circuit
Joyner v. Frontier Airlines, Inc., No. 25-1211 (10th Cir.)	1 September 2026	The district court defined the class of workers too narrowly by looking to the named plaintiffs' actual duties	Anchors the inquiry to the class's typical work, and puts the burden on litigants to build a class-level record

Read in sequence, the four decisions narrow the ways a party can lose the exemption argument for the wrong reason. Bissonnette closed off the industry shortcut. Flowers Foods closed off the geography shortcut. Joyner closes off the individual-duties shortcut. Each removes a proxy and pushes the inquiry back to the statutory text.

The Tenth Circuit's position in that sequence is not incidental. Flowers Foods came out of the Tenth Circuit and was affirmed unanimously in May 2026; three months later the same court was correcting a district court that had over-read the practical reach of the exemption. A circuit that has just been vindicated at the Supreme Court on how broad Section 1 can be is also the circuit insisting that breadth be established at the right level of generality.

What happens next after the Tenth Circuit's remand in Joyner?

The case returns to the District of Colorado, which must determine the attributes of the relevant class of customer service agents and then decide, under the corrected standard, whether that class is engaged in interstate commerce for Section 1 purposes; the arbitration question is reopened, not resolved.

Three outcomes are available on remand. The court may define the class to include routine baggage and cargo handling and again find the exemption satisfied, this time on a record that can survive appeal. It may find that the typical agent's role is a ticketing, check-in and customer-facing job in which bag handling is occasional, and compel arbitration. Or it may find the record inadequate and order further evidence directed at the class rather than the claimants — the likeliest first step given that the original hearing was aimed at the wrong target.

Parties in comparable cases should expect the remand to generate the first Tenth Circuit district-court opinion applying a class-level Section 1 methodology to airport ground staff, which is why the case is worth docketing even by practitioners with no Colorado exposure.

Does the FAA transportation worker exemption stop arbitration altogether?

No. A Section 1 exemption removes the FAA as the source of enforcement power; it does not invalidate the Arbitration Clause, and a state arbitration statute may still supply a basis to compel — which matters here because Menzies and Frontier moved under both the FAA and Colorado law.

This is the single most consequential point the competing coverage of Joyner leaves out. The Colorado Uniform Arbitration Act sits behind the federal motion. Where a state act applies of its own force and the agreement is not drafted to rise or fall with the FAA alone, a claimant who wins the Section 1 argument may have won the federal question and still find the dispute in arbitration. The outcome turns on drafting: an agreement whose choice-of-law and enforcement provisions are tied exclusively to the FAA leaves nothing behind when Section 1 applies, while one that invokes state law in the alternative preserves a fallback.

The related question of FAA Preemption does not arise in the ordinary case, because a state statute enforcing an agreement the FAA does not reach is not displacing federal policy; it is operating in a space the FAA has vacated.

Why the class-definition rule matters to Mass Arbitration

Section 1 fights look like individual employment disputes and function like gateway rulings for entire workforces. The reason is arithmetic. A hub airport ground-handling operation, a regional warehouse network or a last-mile delivery fleet employs thousands of people in the same role under the same contract. One ruling on what that class typically does determines the forum for all of them.

If the class is exempt, the employer faces aggregated litigation: a wage class action, one judge, one damages model, classwide discovery. If the class is not exempt, the same workforce is routed into individual arbitrations under a Class Action Waiver — which is precisely the condition that produces Mass Arbitration, with coordinated counsel filing demands in volume, provider fee schedules and Batching protocols governing how the inventory moves, and the respondent's exposure driven as much by administrative fees as by merits.

Counsel on both sides therefore have a reason to care about the level of generality at which the class is drawn that has nothing to do with the named plaintiffs. Draw the class narrowly — "customer service agents who load checked baggage onto conveyors at Denver International Airport" — and the exemption is easier to satisfy. Draw it broadly — "customer service agents employed by ground-handling contractors" — and it is harder. Joyner does not supply a rule for choosing between those framings, and the remand is where that gap will first be felt.

Question	Individual-level evidence (insufficient after Joyner)	Class-level evidence (what the remand calls for)
What is the job?	The named plaintiffs' testimony about their own shifts	Written job description, posting, and classification for the position
How much transportation work?	Hours these plaintiffs spent on bags	Staffing model and task allocation across the station or network
Is the work core or incidental?	Whether these plaintiffs did it "actually and routinely"	Whether the role as designed requires it of everyone in the class
Who is in the class?	The plaintiffs and those similarly situated to them	The category of workers defined by the work, wherever employed
Proof vehicle	Plaintiff declarations and cross-examination	Corporate designee testimony, training materials, operations manuals

What it means for employers, claimants' counsel and drafters

For employers and their counsel in the Tenth Circuit, the immediate lesson is evidentiary. A motion to compel arbitration against a putative class of transportation-adjacent workers should be supported from the outset by class-level proof of what the role entails, and should resist the temptation to litigate the named plaintiffs' individual duties — a strategy that may win in the district court and lose on appeal, at the cost of eighteen months. Where an evidentiary hearing is ordered, the witness list should be built around operations and human resources designees who can speak to the position, not around the claimants.

For claimants' counsel, the reciprocal point is that a Section 1 record must now be pleaded and developed at class level. Complaints should describe the role, not merely the plaintiffs; discovery in aid of arbitrability should seek job descriptions, staffing plans and training materials; and the class definition advanced for Section 1 purposes should be chosen deliberately, with an eye to the transportation functions that are genuinely typical rather than to the plaintiffs who are most sympathetic.

For drafters, Joyner is a reminder that Section 1 risk is managed in the contract as much as in the courtroom. Agreements covering workforces anywhere near the movement of goods should state an enforceable basis independent of the FAA, should specify the governing state arbitration act, and should say what happens if the FAA is held inapplicable — whether the agreement survives under state law or falls entirely. An agreement that is silent on that contingency converts a Section 1 ruling into a total loss of the arbitral forum.

None of this is legal advice, and the doctrinal position is unsettled in a specific way: no appellate court has told litigants how to choose the level of generality at which a class of workers is drawn. Until one does, the answer will be decided case by case, on the quality of the record each side builds.

Frequently asked questions

Are airline customer service agents exempt from the Federal Arbitration Act?

Not as a categorical matter. The Tenth Circuit did not decide the question in Joyner; it held only that the exemption must be assessed by reference to the class of workers' typical duties, and remanded. The Fifth Circuit reached the opposite result on comparable facts in Eastus v. ISS Facility Services, Inc., No. 19-20258 (5th Cir. 2020), holding that a ticketing and gate agent supervisor was not an exempt transportation worker.

What is the citation for the Tenth Circuit's decision?

Joyner v. Frontier Airlines, Inc., No. 25-1211 (10th Cir. 1 September 2026), a published opinion by Judge Murphy, joined by Judges Tymkovich and Bacharach, on appeal from the District of Colorado, No. 1:24-CV-01672-SKC-TPO.

How does Joyner change motions to compel arbitration in wage-and-hour class actions?

It changes the proof, not the standard. A movant must now direct its evidence at what the relevant class of workers typically does, and a district court that resolves Section 1 on the named plaintiffs' individual duties is applying the wrong test — an error that is reviewable on interlocutory appeal under FAA Section 16.

Which workers are most likely to be affected by the ruling?

Roles clustered around the movement of goods without necessarily transporting them across state lines: airport ground handling and ramp staff, gate and ticketing agents who handle checked baggage, warehouse and fulfillment-center workers, last-mile and intrastate delivery drivers, and freight terminal staff. Bissonnette means the employer's industry is irrelevant; Flowers Foods means an intrastate route is no bar; Joyner means the inquiry runs on the class.

Does winning a Section 1 argument mean a worker goes to court?

Not necessarily. Section 1 withdraws the FAA, but a state arbitration statute may still support an order compelling arbitration where the agreement is not drafted to depend on the FAA alone. In Joyner the employers moved under both the FAA and Colorado law, so the state-law path remains open on remand.