A federal judge in Newark has rejected Wells Fargo Bank's motion to strike class allegations in a suit claiming it made hourly workers solicit new accounts while working off the clock.

The ruling comes as Wells Fargo attempts to dig itself out of a scandal over allegations that employees were pressured to open millions of unauthorized accounts in the names of existing customers. Last year the bank was fined $185 million by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the city and county of Los Angeles in the case.

Wells Fargo said in the motion that no objective mechanism is available for identifying who is in the proposed class, but U.S. District Judge Esther Salas of the District of New Jersey disagreed, finding that company records would permit documentation of who is a class member. Salas also rejected Wells Fargo's assertion that the proposed class is an impermissible fail-safe class, meaning that identifying class members requires a determination of the merits of a proposed class member's claim as a prerequisite to class membership. Salas agreed that the class appears fail-safe, but she said the law is unclear about whether such a class is impermissible and that the defendant's objection on that basis should be addressed at the class certification stage.