Wage & Hour Class And Collective Action Review – 2025

the plaintiffs in those jurisdictions must be prepared to present more comprehensive evidence to secure collective action certification. Floyd, et al. v. Stryker Corp ., 2024 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 179 (N.D. Tex. Jan. 2, 2024), is an example of a wage and hour FLSA lawsuit that demonstrates how even a single declaration offered by a plaintiff is enough to support conditional certification. The plaintiff, a customer service team member (CSR), filed a collective action alleging that the defendant failed to pay for work performed off-the-clock processing orders after shifts were over in violation of the FLSA. The court granted plaintiff’s motion for conditional certification, approving a proposed collective action that included all customer service team members and senior team members who worked at the defendant’s Flower Mound, Texas facility from January 2, 2021, to the present. The CSR’s primary responsibility was to process orders. In support of the motion, the plaintiff offered her own declaration that stated that all CSRs shared similar job duties, worked in the same location, had similar hours, and were subject to similar supervisory policies. The court opined that these factors supported conditional certification. The court found that the lack of individualized defenses also favored conditional certification, and that the defendant failed to offer any arguments establishing significantly different practices among team leads regarding overtime. The court concluded that managing the case collectively would efficiently resolve common issues and lower costs for the plaintiffs. In Correa, et al. v. NRP Food Solutions, Inc ., Case No. 24 Civ. 5220 (S.D.N.Y. Nov. 5, 2024), the plaintiff filed a collective action alleging that the defendant failed to pay all wages due in violation of the FLSA. The plaintiff filed a motion for conditional certification of a collective action, and the court granted the motion. The court found that the plaintiff made the modest factual showing necessary to establish that the plaintiff and opt-in plaintiffs were all subject to a common policy or plan that violated the law. The court ruled that the evidence that plaintiff submitted in support of the motion was sufficient for purposes of granting conditional certification. Accordingly, the court granted the plaintiff’s motion. In Tay, et al. v. The New York And Presbyterian Hospital , 2024 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 173097 (S.D.N.Y. Sept. 24, 2024), the plaintiff filed a collective action alleging that the defendant (NYPH) violated the FLSA by failing to pay for meal and rest breaks and using an unlawful rounding policy. The plaintiff filed a motion for conditional certification of a collective action, and the court granted the motion. The plaintiff sought conditional certification of a statewide group of current and former non-exempt employees working across NYPH’s network of 16 hospitals as patient care assistants, nurse assistants, and medical technicians. The defendant argued that the hospitals were single enterprises such that they operated independently. The court, however, determined that the plaintiff offered sufficient evidence of common ownership of the hospitals and central management oversight, including testimony that the workforce management system was centralized across all NYPH hospitals. The plaintiff also offered affidavits from employees claiming they were subject to the same wage policies, including receiving a single paycheck for work across different campuses. The court thus found that the plaintiff sufficiently demonstrated that NYPH operated as a single integrated enterprise. The defendant also argued that the rounding policy used at NYPH was not a common issue for all employees and that it was not used unlawfully at the hospitals. The court reasoned that at the conditional certification stage, it was only concerned with whether the named and opt-in plaintiffs shared common issues of law or fact. The court determined that the plaintiff provided evidence of a uniform rounding policy across all NYPH facilities, where employees’ clock-in and clock-out times were rounded to the nearest quarter-hour and included time records and affidavits showing how the policy negatively affected her and other employees. The court concluded that the fact that there might be individual variations in how the rounding policy affected employees did not prevent conditional certification. The court also held that the plaintiff’s declarations showed that she, and other employees, regularly worked through their meal breaks without pay were sufficient to establish that they were similarly-situated for purposes of conditional certification under 29 U.S.C. § 216(b). For these reasons, the court granted the plaintiff’s motion for conditional certification of a collective action. The plaintiff in Perry, et al. v. Kansas Star Casino, LLC , Case No. 24-CV-1183 (D. Kan. Oct. 30, 2024), filed a collective action alleging that the defendant’s tip-pool for casino workers violated the FLSA. The plaintiff alleged that workers were shorted on wages and overtime compensations because of an illegal tip pool policy. The plaintiff filed a motion for conditional certification of a collective action. The defendant elected not to oppose the motion and agreed to a stipulation relative to conditional certification. The court reviewed and analyzed the motion for conditional certification as well as the proposed stipulation and granted the plaintiff’s motion. The

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