Wage & Hour Class And Collective Action Review – 2025

Circuit reversed the denial of class certification for the rest break claim and affirmed the denial of class certification for the bag check claim. Hamm, et al. v. Acadia Healthcare Co., Inc., 2024 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 160319 (E.D. La. Sept. 6, 2024), demonstrates procedural uncertainties which remain after the Fifth Circuit’s adoption of the Swales framework. Acadia is a leading provider of behavioral healthcare services that operates a network of approximately 250 facilities in thirty-eight states and Puerto Rico. Acadia previously employed the plaintiffs, Amy Hamm and Joye Wilson, as nurses at hospitals it operated in Texas and Louisiana. Id. at *3. On May 22, 2020, the plaintiffs filed a complaint alleging Acadia violated the FLSA and Louisiana state law by failing to pay overtime compensation for on-duty meal periods and off-the-clock work. Id. Specifically, the two former workers claimed the hospital operator automatically deducted 30 minutes from the nurses’ paychecks for meal breaks despite constant interruptions and the requirement to remain on call to respond to potential emergencies during the breaks. Id. The plaintiffs moved for conditional certification of their FLSA claims as a collective action, but prior to hearing the plaintiffs’ motion, the court found that “limited discovery [was] needed” to evaluate “whether the employees in [the] proposed collective action [were] similarly-situated” within the meaning of Section 216(b) of the FLSA. Id. Ultimately, after the parties conducted the limited discovery, the court partially granted the plaintiffs’ motion to certify, and on July 13, 2022, defined the collective action to include all current and former hourly, non-exempt employees directly involved with patient care — such as nurses, nursing staff, aides and technicians — who worked for Acadia between May 2017 through the date of the dispute’s resolution. Acadia later filed a motion to decertify the plaintiffs’ collective action, arguing that using the Swales framework in lieu of the two-step process did not mean defendants forfeited their ability to later seek decertification. Id. at *13. Ultimately, the court ruled that Acadia’s motion to decertify came too late and that “to allow such a motion would be a waste of judicial resources.” Id. The court reasoned that once certified under the Swales framework, after an opportunity to conduct preliminary discovery and fully brief the issues, there is no justification for a motion to decertify. Id. Although the Fifth Circuit has not yet ruled on whether a defendant may bring a motion to decertify after the initial certification of an FLSA collective action under the Swales framework, the court opined that the Swales decision was not intended to allow this. Id. at *14. The importance of establishing material variations amongst the members of the collective action after conditional certification is demonstrated by Learing, et al. v. Anthem Cos., 2024 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 51077 (D. Minn. Mar. 22, 2024). The plaintiffs, a group of utilization review nurses (NMMs), filed a class and collective action alleging that the defendant misclassified them and similarly-situated nurses from the FLSA overtime pay requirements. The court previously had granted the plaintiffs’ motion for conditional certification of a collective action of the FLSA claims. The defendant subsequently moved to decertify the collective action, and the court denied the motion. The plaintiff thereafter sought to certify a class action pursuant to Rule 23 for the state law claims, and the court granted the motion. The defendant hires nurses to review medical authorization requests submitted by healthcare providers to determine whether the services they have provided were medically necessary and therefore eligible for coverage, or medical management or utilization review. The defendant contended that utilization review nurses were properly classified as exempt employees due to their diverse work settings, and the complex nature of their assigned authorization requests. The plaintiffs argued collective action certification was proper because NMMs were uniformly governed by the defendant’s overarching policies, training protocols, and performance expectations, regardless of their specific areas of work. Id. at *6. The court concluded that despite some differences in NMMs’ assignments, all operated under a common employment framework that outlined their main duties, individual authority levels, and job performance standards. Id. at *6-7. Consequently, for FLSA certification purposes, the court found that all NMMs were similarly-situated within the defendant’s company. Further, for Rule 23 class certification, the court opined that common questions about the defendant’s employment framework for NMMs and related roles predominated over individual discrepancies. The court opined that the similarities of the defendant’s practices with respect to NMMs outweighed any individual variations, as it used standardized job descriptions for each level of NMM, all NMMs were required to follow the defendant’s policies and procedures, all job classifications were common, and all were subject to the same performance evaluation metrics and productivity expectations. Id. at *9. The court therefore denied the defendant’s motion to decertify the collective action. The court also found that the plaintiffs met the requirements of Rule 23 and granted the motion for class certification. Savinova, et al. v. Nova Home Care, LLC, 2024 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 57581 (D. Conn. Mar. 29, 2024), demonstrates the differing standards applicable to Rule 23 class certification and FLSA collective action

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