92 | Massachusetts Wage & Hour Peculiarities, 2025 ed. © 2025 Seyfarth Shaw LLP Under the FLSA, “drivers” are those who operate motor vehicles in the course of interstate or foreign commerce.519 An employee may perform other job duties and still qualify as a driver because the regulations explicitly recognize that “even full-duty drivers devote some of their working time to activities other than such driving.”520 “Drivers’ helpers” are those who are required to ride on a motor vehicle at least part of the time and whose work impacts the safety or operation of the truck.521 An employee who loads trucks but does not ride on them does not qualify as a helper.522 Under federal law, “loaders” are those with responsibility “for exercising judgment and discretion in planning and building a balanced load or in placing, distributing, or securing the pieces of freight in such a manner that the safe operation of the vehicles on the highways in interstate or foreign commerce will not be jeopardized.”523 Loaders may also be involved with unloading and transferring freight, so long as they are primarily responsible for safely loading trucks.524 “Mechanics” are defined as those employees who keep vehicles in safe working condition.525 Employees who fall within one of the four categories set forth above may be completely exempt from the FLSA’s overtime requirements during any workweek in which they perform duties that directly affect the safe operation of commercial vehicles, even if those duties are not their primary function. If the employee is available to be called upon to perform such duties, the exemption may apply regardless of the proportion of time spent performing safety-affecting work in any particular workweek.526 The federal MCA exemption also requires that goods be moved in interstate commerce.527 Work involves the transport of goods in interstate commerce when it is directly linked to the movement of such goods across state lines or national borders.528 However, a driver need not actually cross into another state to be exempt if his or her employer can show that the work was part of a continuity of movement from the origin of the shipment to its destination in another state or country.529 Even where goods are shipped from their origin to an in-state storage facility, with no fixed and persisting destination at the time of shipment, their transport may still qualify as 519 29 C.F.R. § 782.3. 520 29 C.F.R. § 782.3(a). 521 29 C.F.R. § 782.4. 522 See id. 523 29 C.F.R. § 782.5(a). 524 Id. 525 29 C.F.R. § 782.6. 526 29 C.F.R. § 782.2(b)(3). 527 The Massachusetts motor carrier exemption is also limited to employees moving goods in interstate commerce. M.G.L. ch. 151, § 1A(8). 528 29 C.F.R. § 782.7(a). 529 29 C.F.R. § 782.7(b)(1); see Bilyou v. Dutchess Beer Distribs., Inc., 300 F.3d 217, 223 (2d Cir. 2002) (“Even if a carrier's transportation does not cross state lines, the interstate commerce requirement is satisfied if the goods being transported within the borders of one State are involved in a ‘practical continuity of movement’ in the flow of interstate commerce.”) (quoting Walling v. Jacksonville Paper Co., 317 U.S. 564, 568 (1943)).
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