The court concluded that the defendants made a prima facie case for the applicability of the taxicab exemption. The court ruled that due to the complexity of the defendant ’ s operations, addressing the taxicab exemption on a collective-wide basis would be infeasible. Accordingly, the court granted the defendant ’ s motion to decertify the collective action. Another example where individualized issues successfully defeated a collective action is Reinig, et al. v. RBS Citizens, N.A., 2023 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 149802 (W.D. Penn. Aug. 25, 2023). The plaintiffs, group of current and former Mortgage Loan Officers (MLOs), filed a class and collective action alleging that the defendant maintained an unofficial policy of discouraging MLOs from reporting overtime, thereby resulting in unpaid overtime wages in violation of the FLSA and state wage & hour laws. Previously, the court had granted conditional certification to a collective action consisting of 351 MLOs. However, an appeal found issues with the collective action and resulted in a remand of the case for further proceedings. Following an evidentiary hearing, the court denied class certification for the Rule 23 state court claims, and granted the motion as to the conditionally certified collective action. Following discovery, the court denied the defendant ’ s motion to decertify the collective action. The defendant filed a motion for reconsideration of the decertification motion. The court subsequently granted the motion, and decertified the collective action. The court stated that the defendant ’ s evidence presented at the evidentiary hearing established that the plaintiffs were not similarly-situated to the members of the conditionally certified collective action. The court found that the MLOs did not demonstrate that they were subject to a common employer practice of discouraging overtime reporting, because while some MLOs testified that they were discouraged from recording overtime, others testified that they were encouraged to report overtime hours, and some provided inconsistent reasons for not recording overtime. The court noted that this lack of consistency in the MLOs’ experiences undermined the plaintiffs’ claim of a common employer practice. Additionally, the court considered the different factual and employment settings of the MLOs. The court noted that the employees worked in 18 different states, had flexibility in how they performed their duties, and had different managers with varying degrees of oversight. Accordingly, the court found that decertification was warranted, and granted the defendant ’ s motion. Evidence that some proposed class members are uninjured was critical to defeating class certification in WIlliams, et al. v. Amazon.com Services LLC, 2023 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 37980 (N.D Cal. Mar. 7, 2023). The plaintiff, a warehouse employee, filed a class action alleging that the defendant violated the California Labor Code by failing to reimburse him and other employees for home internet expenses incurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. The plaintiff filed a motion for class certification for the claims of nearly 7,000 employees who worked from home in California at any time from March 15, 2020 through July 1, 2022. The court denied the motion, finding that common questions would not predominate. The plaintiff contended that the relevant inquiry was whether the defendant ’ s written expense reimbursement policy in its FAQs, including the illegal provision that the defendant would only allow employees to seek reimbursement for incremental increases in home internet costs, which was in force as of May 2020, violated § 2802 of the Labor Code. Id. at *2. The court found that, from the record, many class members received reimbursements for home internet expenses in amounts that could not possibly be characterized as “incremental,” and therefore, the defendant did not violate § 2802 as to a subset of the proposed class, regardless of what the defendant may have said in its FAQs. Id. at *4. The plaintiff, alternatively, offered a theory based not on any reimbursement policy, but rather grounded in the reality of what happened in the years following the start of the pandemic. Id. at *4-5. The court determined that this theory potentially could lead to a predominantly common question capable of class-wide treatment, but the plaintiff failed to address the fact that there was a substantial portion of the class that did receive internet expense reimbursements. For these reasons, the court denied the plaintiff ’ s motion for class certification. Another example of how individualized issues can preclude class certification is Ali, et al. v. Setton Pistachio Of Terra Bella Inc ., 2023 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 22172 (E.D. Cal. Feb. 9, 2023). The plaintiff filed a class action alleging that the defendant violated the California Labor Code by implementing an unlawful rounding policy that failed to fully compensate hourly employees for their actual hours worked. The plaintiff filed a motion for class certification pursuant to Rule 23, and the court granted the motion. The plaintiff
30
© Duane Morris LLP 2024
Wage & Hour Class And Collective Action Review – 2024
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online