This was a bad decision that is often studied in law school for the wrong reasons. The judge clearly did not understand grammar, as the understanding advanced by the drivers leads to an ungrammatical sentence where every item is separated by a comma and there is no conjunction, so it clearly could not be properly read the way they read it.
(For clarity's sake, let's just say it read "packing" instead of "packing for shipment or distribution" at the end. It would then read as follows: "The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing of:". Where's the conjunction? We don't even know if the commas are supposed to signify "and" or "or"!)
But the decision was ultimately motivated by politics by the judge and not an actual careful reading of the text anyway.
Yes, but not for reasons involving the serial comma. Every item on that list is a gerund, except for "shipment" and "distribution." If they were supposed to be read as part of the same series, it would read "storing, packing for shipment or distributing of." Of course in a real case you'd also look at the legislative history, which I'm too lazy to do here, but grammatically I think this favors the drivers.
Mixing gerunds and non-gerunds is perfectly grammatically permissible and not indicative one or another unless it's totally ambiguous. But it's not, as indicated above.
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