Every year, there are a handful of Supreme Court cases that do not make headlines yet have major implications for thousands of people in this country. This year, Bissonnette v. LePage Bakeries is one of those cases. In a short, unanimous opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court rejected the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit’s narrow construction of the exemption for transportation workers in the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA), thus opening the courthouse doors to workers complaining of labor law violations who would otherwise be forced into mandatory arbitration.

Bissonnette involved section one of the FAA, which exempts “contracts of employment of seamen, railroad employees, or any other class of workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce” from the FAA’s coverage. The Court held nearly 25 years ago in Circuit City Stores, Inc. v. Adams that section one only exempts employment contracts of “transportation workers.” But the Court did not define that phrase in Circuit City, nor does it appear in the FAA. As a result, for years, lower federal courts have struggled with—and often disagreed about—what it means to be a “transportation worker.”

In Bissonnette, the Court put to rest one aspect of that debate: it held that transportation workers are defined by “what they do, not for whom they do it.” The Court thus overturned the Second Circuit’s ruling that “a transportation worker must work for a company in the transportation industry to be exempt under §1 of the FAA.” The result: the truck-driver plaintiffs in Bissonnette who work directly for a large commercial bakery (as opposed to a trucking company) can still qualify as “transportation workers” even though their employer is in the baked-goods industry.

The Court’s holding in Bissonnette flowed primarily from the Court’s application of precedent and an analysis of the FAA’s text. The Court began with the Circuit City case. There, a sales counselor at an electronics store argued that section one exempted all contracts of employment from arbitration. The Court, in a sharply divided opinion, balked at that construction of the exemption, invoking the interpretive principle known as ejusdem generis, which posits that when a general phrase follows a list of specifics, the general phrase should be interpreted to include only items of the same class. Accordingly, the Court held that for a “class of workers” to be exempt under section one, they must share the defining characteristic of “seamen” and “railroad employees”—that is, be “transportation workers.”

The Bissonnette opinion then turned to the Court’s recent decision in Southwest Airlines Co. v. Saxon. In that case, the Court held that an airline employee was a member of a “class of workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce” because of the nature of the work that the employee performed. Specifically, her work loading cargo on and off airplanes made her part of a “class of workers in foreign or interstate commerce,” even though she did not regularly cross state lines. At the same time, the Court emphasized that it did not rule in Saxon’s favor just because she worked for an airline—that is, a company in the transportation industry. It explained that Saxon was exempt “based on what she does at Southwest, not what Southwest does generally.”

According to the Court, the opinions in both Circuit City and Saxon could be applied directly to Bissonnette. Both cases, the Court explained, focused on the performance of work for the purpose of ascertaining whether a worker falls within section one, rather than focusing on for whom the work is performed. The Court’s opinion also noted that neither Circuit City nor Saxon silently imposed an atextual industry requirement on the text of section one (even if Circuit City did impose an atextual “transportation” requirement—a point Bissonnette did not mention).

Moreover, the Court expressed concern about the practical results of imputing an industry requirement to section one. How does a court decide whether a business operates in the “transportation industry”? Deriding the test the Second Circuit created from whole cloth for such an inquiry, the Court explained that it “would often turn on arcane riddles about the nature of a company’s services”—riddles especially hard to answer for massive corporations “like Amazon and Walmart—which both sell products of their own and transport products sold by third parties.”

Finally, the Court rejected the argument that historical statutes regulating seamen and railroad employees based on their industries necessarily require reading an industry requirement into section one. The Court pointed out that those historical statutory schemes contained additional language specifically referring to industries, and it would be “strange to read the conspicuous absence of similar industry-specific language in § 1 as a sign that Congress defined the exemption on an industrywide basis.”

So why didn’t Bissonnette receive more attention? After all, more than 3 million people work as truck drivers in the United States. The Bissonnette decision potentially opens the courthouse doors to thousands of them—and other transportation workers—who would otherwise be forced into private arbitration proceedings where the decks are notoriously stacked against them in favor of their corporate employers.

Perhaps the answer is because the case decided a very narrow issue—a fact that the Chief Justice repeatedly emphasized throughout his opinion for the Court. As a result, the truck drivers in Bissonnette may have won the battle, but they have not yet won the war. The Supreme Court vacated and remanded the Second Circuit’s decision imposing an industry requirement without deciding two critical questions: (1) whether the truck drivers are in fact “transportation workers,” given that they apparently do tasks for their employer beyond transporting truckloads of baked goods, and (2) whether the drivers are “engaged in… interstate commerce” even though they do not drive across state lines. Under current precedent, the lower federal courts must answer both questions in the affirmative for the truck drivers to be exempt from the FAA under section one.

Other cases percolating in the courts of appeals may ultimately require the Supreme Court to address these sorts of questions. Particularly in recent years, with the explosion of e-commerce, delivery services, and the sharing economy, lower federal courts have repeatedly faced questions about the scope of section one’s coverage. For instance, does it exempt Uber drivers who primarily, though not exclusively, transport passengers within a single state? What about “last-mile” Amazon delivery drivers who deliver packages from Amazon warehouses to their final destinations? Are they “engaged in… interstate commerce” because the packages they deliver cross state lines, even though the workers do not?

No doubt these questions are made more difficult by the convoluted analysis in Circuit City. But the good news is that the Court, in recent years, seems to have retreated from the pro-arbitration policy-driven approach employed in Circuit City, instead following the plain text of section one and its original public meaning. Bissonnette, Saxon, and another recent decision, New Prime v. Oliveira (which held that employment contracts involving independent contractors, not just traditional employees, are exempt under section one) are all examples of this revised—and improved—approach.

Perhaps to the surprise of many familiar with the Roberts Court and big business’s success before it, all three cases were unanimous and resounding victories for workers. They demonstrate that carefully deployed arguments grounded in text and history can sometimes move even the most conservative courts to reach progressive outcomes.