Supreme Court seems receptive to Iowa workers in class-action lawsuit
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Version 0 of 1. A case that big business hoped could provide new limits on class-action suits took a different turn at the Supreme Court on Tuesday, and questions from a majority of the justices signaled there might be an unexpected win for workers. The justices did not appear inclined to overturn a $5.8 million verdict against a Tyson Foods pork-producing plant in Storm Lake, Iowa. Workers there had banded together to say they had not been properly compensated for the time they spent putting on required protective gear and walking to their workstations. But more broadly, the justices engaged in the kind of fact-specific questioning about knife-wielding workers and mesh belly guards that would not seem to lead to a dramatic change in class-action litigation. The case is one of three the court has accepted this year on petitions from companies worried about class actions. Consumers and plaintiffs’ attorneys say such suits are efficient and economical ways to settle disputes, while businesses say they come at huge costs and benefit lawyers more than the alleged injured. The court recently has been more sympathetic to the business complaints. But the problems for Tyson in this particular case were apparent from the start. “I just don’t understand your arguments,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, an essential vote in the case, told Washington lawyer Carter G. Phillips, who was representing the company. Tyson is claiming that the 3,300 current and former plant workers who brought the suit do not have enough similarities in their duties to be able to use statistical averages to prove that they have not been compensated for overtime accumulated “donning and doffing” the protective gear and doing other tasks necessary for their work. The class represented more than “400 jobs which required widely differing amounts of time to perform their donning, doffing and washing tasks,” Phillips said, adding that “this notion that you patch over the entirety of these problems simply by averaging all of the times of all of these employees is simply the kind of shortcut this court has rejected in the past in both Comcast and Wal-Mart.” Phillips was referring to two cases in which the court shut down class-action attempts. In the Wal-Mart case, the court ruled for the corporate giant in a class-action suit filed on behalf of 1.5 million female employees claiming discrimination. But Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg questioned whether the jobs were so dissimilar. “There was a difference between the knife wielders and the others, but they weren’t all that different,” she said. “So in one case, one wore mesh aprons, and in the other case, rubber aprons. It didn’t seem to be that wide disparity.” More problematic for Phillips is that Kennedy and the court’s liberals thought the case fell under a nearly 70-year-old Supreme Court precedent. It says that when the company has kept poor records of the time required for the tasks required of workers — and Tyson acknowledges that is the case here — the workers are allowed to use statistics to calculate the lost time. Justice Stephen G. Breyer, quoting from the decision in Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co., said, “And then it says the employer can’t complain that the damages lack the exactness and precision of measurement that would be possible had he kept records.” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., more sympathetic to Tyson, worried that there were undeserving members of the class. “I don’t see how you can at this point . . . separate the employees who were injured from the employees who were not injured,” he said. But Justice Elena Kagan said that the jury in the case awarded a lump sum and that a lower court judge will make decisions on who is compensated and in what amount. “We know the names of every single person who would be entitled to an award,” said David C. Frederick, a Washington lawyer arguing on behalf of the workers. At one point, Kennedy asked what standard the court should set if it rules in favor of the workers and their use of representative evidence. The Obama administration is supporting the workers, and Assistant Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar supplied an answer. “The jury was told in this case that they could only rely on representative evidence if all of the employees performed substantially similar activities,” Prelogar said, “and that substantial similarity is what we think is the proper standard to determine whether an inference here would be just and reasonable.” The case is Tyson Foods v. Bouaphakeo. |