The US Supreme Court has taken a step towards ruling on the legitimacy of class action law suits at an oral hearing for a case against Tyson Foods. This challenge is the third such case to come before the Court in the past month, where companies have sought to overturn class actions involving groups of consumers or workers.
The case arrived before the Supreme Court due to Tyson Foods appealing a jury verdict that it had underpaid a large amount of workers at their Iowa meat processing facility. The case is thought to be of great significance due to determination of what type of injury rises to the level of lawsuit, and particularly a lawsuit in which a vast number of people can join together and pursue a company for compensation. The Executive Director of legal watchdog group Public Justice, Paul Bland, has stated that in this litigation “the stakes for consumer and employment class actions are absolutely enormous.”
The facts of the case concerned a group of workers staking a claim for payment of overtime for periods spent taking on and off mandatory protective gear and walking within the facility to their work station. The appeal taken by Tyson Foods to the Supreme Court was rooted in two main issues. Firstly, whether differences between individual members of the class action could be ignored under a class action certified by either the Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23(b)(3) or alternatively a collective action under the Fair Labor Standards Act. These differences were ignored by the workers in this case who used statistical techniques that presume that all class members were identical. Secondly, Tyson contested whether a class may be certified if it contains hundreds of members who were not injured and have no legal right to damages.
In reply to the first challenge, the opinion of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg stated that “the differences between jobs and gear were not so great as to make statistical averaging unreliable.” While in response to the second question the Court appeared to rely on the precedent of the 1946 case Anderson v Mt. Clemens Pottery Co., which had been raised in amicus curiae by the US government. With Justice Kennedy highlighting the Anderson case, which he stated produced a burden-shifting framework whereby if an employer failed to record the precise hours of each employee’s workday, the plaintiff can offer a sample of employees unpaid hours. Such an approximation would be sufficient to presume all employees of the suit suffered the same injury. While the above discussion from the November oral hearing points to the support of the workers’ class action, the Court’s final determination on the case is not due until Spring 2016.
Click here for an analysis by USA Today.
Click here for the full judgment of Anderson v Mt. Clemens Pottery Co. [1946].