Duane Morris Discrimination Class Action Review – 2024

classes that sought religious accommodations failed to establish that the question of whether each employees’ beliefs were sincerely held religious beliefs could be addressed on a class-wide basis. The court also stated that individualized inquiries would be required to determine whether a worker was a qualified individual with a disability. The court ruled that the plaintiffs failed to establish why the individualized assessment regarding the accommodations of masking and social distancing (or some other type of accommodation) for each distinct class member would not defeat typicality, commonality, and predominance. Id . The court therefore determined that a class action would not be the superior method of adjudication and denied the plaintiffs’ motion for class certification. 4. Rulings Granting Preemptive Motions To Strike And Dismiss Class Action Claims On The Face Of The Pleadings Aggressive defendants frequently seek to quell a class action before it even gets off the ground by attacking the sufficiency of the claims as they are pled in the complaint. If successful, the benefits of this strategy are plain and significant by eliminating the class allegations before the plaintiff ever gets to probe the defendant on their policies, procedures, or other practices in class-wide discovery. However, these efforts are often difficult, as they require convincing the court that no amount of discovery will alter the fact that plaintiffs’ claims or class certification theories are fundamentally flawed. But while difficult to prove, defendants can and do prevail, as was the case in Jirek, et al. v. Astrazeneca Pharmaceuticals LP, 2023 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 12667 (N.D. Ill. Jan. 25, 2023). The plaintiffs filed a class action seeking to represent other female sales employees who allegedly received less pay than their male counterparts. The defendant brought a motion to dismiss, and the court dismissed the federal and state law claims because the plaintiffs failed to satisfy their prima facie burden. The court opined that the complaint ’ s fundamental flaw was in failing to identify higher paid male comparators performing equal work. Neither the complaint ’ s overly broad job descriptions nor the plaintiffs’ insistence that these details would be unearthed during discovery were sufficient to allow the proposed class action to survive. The plaintiffs in O’Brien, et al. v. Amazon.Com, Inc., 2023 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 33775 (N.D. Cal. Jan. 27, 2023), met a similar fate. The plaintiffs, representing former Amazon warehouse employees, alleged violations of the California Fair Employment and Housing Act due to work quotas it maintained that allegedly caused a disparate impact on older employees. In dismissing the complaint, the court clarified it was the plaintiffs’ burden not only to identify the decision-making process that created a disproportionate impact, but also to isolate the specific employment practice allegedly responsible for the statistical disparity. The court found that plaintiffs failed to provide sufficient factual or statistical evidence demonstrating a causal connection between the defendant ’ s policies and a significant disparate impact. Ultimately, because the plaintiffs’ generalized assumptions about the effects of aging on physical ability could not support their claim, the court dismissed the action. Similarly, in Leake, et al. v. Raytheon Technologies Corp., 2023 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 32177 (D. Ariz. Feb. 27, 2023), a group of terminated employees, who previously declined to receive the COVID-19 vaccination and also refused to abide by the company ’ s mask policy and weekly testing accommodation, brought discrimination and retaliation claims under Title VII. Citing both religious and medical objections to the vaccine, the plaintiffs refused to comply with the company ’ s accommodations, which they argued were harassing and created a hostile work environment (together with company-wide emails and public signs promoting safety steps against the virus). The district court summarily rejected plaintiffs’ position. On their disparate treatment allegations, the court noted that the plaintiffs failed to identify membership in any protected class or what religious beliefs they held, and failed to distinguish their treatment from other exempt employees. Their hostile work environment claims were equally feeble, said the court, noting that COVID-19 prevention signs visible to all employees did not target the plaintiffs, nor were they unreasonable or harassing in and of themselves. Finally, the court concluded that the plaintiffs’ retaliation claims neither alleged that the employees engaged in a protected activity nor established a causal link between that activity and their termination. These failures provided the court ample support to dismiss the

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