A class action allegation cannot succeed when each employee works a different schedule and has countless other fact-dependent duties and responsibilities. For one employer, thousands of employees with varied work schedules and pay rates could not demonstrate “class” status for Fair Labor Standards Act purposes. This was particularly true when the employees were paid on a piece-rate system, said the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in its second ruling involving a class action against television company DirectSat. (See Espenscheid v. DirectSat USA, No. 12-1943 (7th Cir., Feb. 4, 2013).)
At the trial court level, the representative plaintiffs tried to get a class of employees certified. The district court denied their certification, and in this action, the plaintiffs appealed that denial to the 7th Circuit. Reversing the decertification would not be a problem if the plaintiffs had been seeking nonmonetary relief, like an injunction. But in this case, they sought monetary damages, and determining those damages would have required more than 2,300 separate evidentiary hearings. As the court explained, it’s not as if each technician worked from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and was forbidden to take a lunch break and so worked a 45-hour week. In a case like that, each technician’s damages could be computed, effortlessly and mechanically, from the number of days he worked each week and his hourly wage. Such mechanical and formulaic calculations do not prohibit a class action. (See, for example, Johnson v. Meriter Health Services Employee Retirement Plan, 702 F.3d 364 (7th Cir. 2012).
However, the unique schedules, duties and other parts of each technicians’ job prohibited such a formulaic calculation. For example, the piece-rate system under which they were paid (paying an employee so many dollars per job) implies a variance in the number of hours worked, because workers differ in their effort and efficiency.
For more, visit Thompson Information Services’ resource, Fair Labor Standards for Private Employers.