U.S. Sup. Ct.;
14-1146
Respondents, employees of petitioner Tyson Foods, work in the kill, cut, and retrim departments of a pork processing plant in Iowa. Respondents’ work requires them to wear protective gear, but the exact composition of the gear depends on the tasks a worker performs on a given day. Petitioner compensated some, but not all, employees for this donning and doffing, and did not record the time each employee spent on those activities. Respondents filed suit, alleging that the donning and doffing were integral and indispensable to their hazardous work and that petitioner’s policy not to pay for those activities denied them overtime compensation required by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA). Respondents also raised a claim under an Iowa wage law. They sought certification of their state claims as a class action under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23 and certification of their FLSA claims as a “collective action.” See 29 U. S. C. §216. Petitioner objected to certification of both classes, arguing that, because of the variance in protective gear each employee wore, the employees’ claims were not sufficiently similar to be resolved on a classwide basis. The District Court concluded that common questions, such as whether donning and doffing protective gear was compensable under the FLSA, were susceptible to classwide resolution even if not all of the workers wore the same gear. To recover for a violation of the FLSA’s overtime provision, the employees had to show that they each worked more than 40 hours a week, inclusive of the time spent donning and doffing. Because petitioner failed to keep records of this time, the employees primarily relied on a study per-formed by an industrial relations expert, Dr. Kenneth Mericle. Mericle conducted videotaped observations analyzing how long various donning and doffing activities took, and then averaged the time taken to produce an estimate of 18 minutes a day for the cut and retrim departments and 21.25 minutes for the kill department. These estimates were then added to the time sheets of each employee to ascertain which class members worked more than 40 hours a week and the value of classwide recovery. Petitioner argued that the varying amounts of time it took employees to don and doff different protective gear made reliance on Mericle’s sample improper, and that its use would lead to recovery for individuals who, in fact, had not worked the requisite 40 hours. The jury awarded the class about $2.9 million in unpaid wages. The award has not yet been disbursed to individual employees. The Eighth Circuit affirmed the judgment and the award.
