Plaintiffs Margarito Canales and Benjamin Bardzik sued Lepage Bakeries Park Street, LLC, CK Sales Co., LLC, and Flowers Foods, Inc., alleging that the defendants misclassified them as independent contractors in violation of Massachusetts law and, as a result, committed violations of Massachusetts wage statutes. The plaintiffs personally delivered bread and merchandise for Lepage — a Maine-based Flowers subsidiary that bakes fresh breads, buns, rolls, and snack cakes — averaging roughly 75 hours per week. They did so through a corporate entity they formed, T&B Doughboys, Inc., which purchased franchise distribution rights from CK Sales and serviced four geographic territories.
The defendants argued that the plaintiffs performed services only for T&B, not for Flowers or its subsidiaries, and that the plaintiffs were owners and employees of a separate corporate entity that had purchased franchise rights. Judge Allison D. Burroughs of the District of Massachusetts denied summary judgment on all four remaining statutory claims — misclassification, wage withholding, minimum wage, and overtime — in a March 30, 2026 memorandum and order.
The central legal question was whether the plaintiffs performed any service for the defendants within the meaning of Massachusetts's independent contractor statute, Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 149, § 148B — the threshold determination that triggers the statute's presumption of employment and the ABC test. The court distinguished the case from the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's 2024 decision in Patel v. 7-Eleven, Inc., which held that five plaintiffs who operated convenience stores pursuant to franchise agreements with 7-Eleven did not perform any service for 7-Eleven within the statute's meaning. The court found it significant that the plaintiffs here apparently serviced only existing customer accounts rather than the general public, and that Flowers publicly referred to those stores as its own customers. The court also noted that the defendants' payment structure — collecting payments from stores and remitting them to T&B after deducting product costs and fees — resembled the arrangement found sufficient in Sebago v. Boston Cab Dispatch, where the putative employer passed on payments from its customers to the plaintiffs for their labor, more than the franchisee bank account arrangement in Patel. Because the defendants did not argue that all three elements of the ABC test were satisfied, they could not establish as a matter of law that the plaintiffs were not their employees.
On the Wage Act claim, the court held that the defendants failed to establish that the payments the plaintiffs received through T&B were not wages, and that the defendants provided no support for their contention that the deductions they made from those payments were allowable or authorized under the statute. The court cited recent district court decisions treating similar deduction schemes — including franchise fees and insurance fees — as unlawful under Massachusetts law.
The overtime ruling turned on two exemptions the defendants invoked. On the administrative exemption, the court held that the defendants provided no factual support for their assertion that supervisory and managerial duties were the plaintiffs' primary duties, and that the undisputed fact that the plaintiffs spent a significant amount of time on physical delivery work strongly cut against the exemption. On the truck-driver exemption under Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 151, § 1A(8), the court held that the defendants could not establish the exemption applied because the record showed the plaintiffs also drove personal vehicles to distribute products, and the defendants had not articulated a standard for when employees who use both exempt and non-exempt vehicles fall outside the overtime statute's protections.
The case reached the summary judgment stage after a lengthy procedural history: the defendants moved to compel arbitration under the Federal Arbitration Act in 2021, losing before the district court; the First Circuit affirmed that ruling; and the Supreme Court denied the defendants' petition for a writ of certiorari. The defendants then moved to compel arbitration a second time, under the Massachusetts Uniform Arbitration Act, and the district court denied that motion as well in October 2023.