The Court ruled unanimously that the exceptions set forth in the FAA, principally for those involved in foreign and interstate commerce such as truck drivers, do apply to contractors as they would to regular employees.

While the terms of his independent contract allow him to drive for other companies, Oliveira found that his schedule was heavily dictated by New Prime.

[2] In 2015, Oliveira started a class-action lawsuit against New Prime, representing all other contracted drivers they had hired, arguing the company was not paying fair wages to its independent contractors.

In a unanimous decision, the Court upheld the findings of the First Circuit, affirming that judgment of whether Section 1 exceptions applied or not was a role for the courts and not arbitration, and that within Oliveira's case, the written intent of the FAA covered any type of employer-employee agreement, including the independent contractor construct, and thus Oliveira was not bound by the FAA to seek arbitration.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing the majority opinion, explained that the way that the FAA was written used the term "contracts of employment"; reviewing dictionaries and other works published around 1925, it was clear that Congress' intent was not specifically tailored to the specific term "employees" but instead to a broader classification of "workers", which would readily cover independent contractors.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a concurring opinion, mirroring Gorsuch and noting the importance of language evolution in law.