How to Steal From Your Employer Using the Courts and Grammar

from The Daily Bell:

What is the point of law? Is it to settle disputes that arise between two individuals; the way common law was born? Or perhaps law is meant to spur debate on the use of the oxford comma, like a high stakes schoolhouse lesson on grammar.

The whole situation is silly from the beginning. You have to peel back layers of ridiculousness before you can even get at the issue: that truckers just won millions of dollars in overtime from their employer because the state law did not insert an oxford comma into their overtime rule.

Maine law states that the following industries are exempt from a rule requiring overtime pay:

The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of: (1) Agricultural produce; (2) Meat and fish products; and (3) Perishable foods.

Does that law exempt “packing for shipment” as well as “distribution” of those goods from the overtime law? Or does it exempt “packing” for “shipment or distribution” as the truckers argued?

Seriously, that is what this case revolved around.

The truckers ended up convincing the courts that the law was ambiguous enough so that they could expect overtime, since “packing” could be understood to apply to both “shipment and distribution” as opposed to “distribution” being a separate sector which does not get overtime.

Read More @ TheDailyBell.com