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Oxford comma key component in labor dispute ruling (CNN)

March 16, 2017

CNN reports an appeals court ruled in favor of a group of dairy drivers in a Maine labor dispute saying guidelines were made too ambiguous by the lack of an Oxford comma, an optional comma that is used before an “and” or “or” at the end of a list within a sentence. A group of dairy drivers argued that they deserved overtime pay for certain tasks they had completed. “Specifically, if that [list of exemptions] used a serial comma to mark off the last of the activities that it lists, then the exemption would clearly encompass an activity that the drivers perform,” the circuit judge wrote. “For want of a comma, we have this case.”