Michael Strauss just wanted the oil workers to get paid appropriately for their dangerous, demanding jobs. That’s why he filed the lawsuit against their employer. “In our view, it’s a small case,” the California-based labor attorney told me. He never imagined it would attract the attention of powerful oil industry groups and the federal government—or that it would go all the way to the United States Supreme Court.

But it has. And on Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Parker Drilling Management Services vs. Newton, an appeal of Strauss’s class action lawsuit against Parker Drilling, a now-bankrupt offshore oil platform operator. The case seeks back pay for more than 25 employees who lived and worked on island-like structures off the California coast. For 14-day stints, the employees would spend 12 hours per day actively working, and the other 12 hours on “controlled standby”—meaning they could do whatever they wanted on the platform, but could be called back to work at any time. California wage law requires employees to be paid for such “on call” time, but Parker Drilling employees were paid only for their 12-hour active shifts and not for the standby. Ergo the lawsuit.

The case, so far, has gone mostly unnoticed, and in a way, it echoes the entire conversation about offshore drilling in the U.S. As the Trump administration seeks to expand and deregulate the controversial practice, the rest of the country has been largely distracted.

The oil industry, however, is not distracted. They’ve been watching Parker Drilling vs. Newton closely. Now, a coalition of powerful trade associations and companies—including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and ExxonMobil—and the federal government are urging the Supreme Court to reverse the lower court’s ruling in favor of the workers, and hold that only federal wage law can apply to oil platforms located on the Outer Continental Shelf, the area of ocean that surrounds the United States, but that is not technically part of any state. The petitioners say the entire oil industry has much to lose—“hundreds of millions,” according to them—if the Supreme Court doesn’t do this. But it also has much to gain if it does.

To understand Parker Drilling vs. Newton, one must also understand what it’s like to work on an offshore oil rig. And Shane Newton—unrelated to the case’s lead plaintiff, Brian Newton—worked on more than 300 of them over the course of 26 years, from 1991 to 2015.