In high school or college, you probably learned about and even debated the necessity of the “Oxford comma.” For those of you who need a refresher on the piece of punctuation, the Oxford comma is a comma that is placed between the last two items in a series of three of more. For example, take the sentence “I like chocolate, coffee, hot dogs, and ketchup.”
In the above sentence, it’s clear that you like four things:
- Chocolate
- Coffee
- Hot dogs
- Ketchup
However, if you take out that third comma, the sentence reads, “I like chocolate, coffee, hot dogs and ketchup.” As that sentence stands, it could be construed that you only enjoy the last two items as a pair. The reader may believe that you no longer like hot dogs and ketchup on their own, and that you only enjoy the items when they are eaten in combination, which makes sense.
The $10 Million Comma
So with that quick English lesson out of the way, let’s take a look at how one comma, more specifically, that lack of a comma, that led to a $10 million payday for workers in the dairy business. In that class action case, drivers for Oakhurst Dairy sued their company for money they believed they were owed in overtime pay. Under Maine law, workers are entitled to 1.5 times their normal pay for any hours worked over 40 per week. There are exemptions to this rule, as one exemption reads that companies don’t need to pay overtime for the following activities:
The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of:
- Agricultural produce;
- Meat and fish product; and
- Perishable foods
When you read that sentence, you may notice that there is no comma after the second to last item in that list, which is packing for shipment. So does that sentence mean that you can’t get overtime for:
- Packing for shipment, and;
- Packing for distribution
or
- Packing for shipment, and;
- Distribution
Without the comma, a reasonable argument could be made for either case, and that’s exactly what drivers who engage in distribution argued. They said that without the comma, the packing for shipment and packing for distribution would be exempt from overtime pay, but distribution in and of itself was not exempt.
If you can believe it, the district court sided with the drivers, ruling that their company owed drivers roughly $10 million in overdue overtime pay. Now that’s an expensive comma!
