Dive Brief:
- A federal district court in Virginia improperly certified a class-action lawsuit against Anheuser-Busch because it failed to consider the “significant variation” among prospective class members, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held June 15 in Overby v. Anheuser-Busch, LLC.
- The lawsuit was filed by two workers on behalf of current or former hourly employees at the brewery’s Williamsburg facility from July 2020 until the present. They alleged the company violated two Virginia state laws and the Fair Labor Standards Act by not paying employees for all their mandatory pre- and post-shift work, including donning and doffing personal protective equipment and complying with Covid-19 protocols.
- The 4th Circuit vacated the certification order and sent the case back to the district court to reconsider whether certification would be proper, given the substantial difference “in the tasks employees performed, when/where those tasks occurred, and the legal standards to which prospective class members are subject.”
Dive Insight:
To obtain class certification, plaintiffs must meet certain criteria, including that the circumstances of individual class members raise common questions of law or fact and that these questions “‘predominate over’ individualized inquiries,” the 4th Circuit explained.
The evidence suggested this wasn’t the case, the court said. For example, not all of the employees wore PPE, such as steel-toed boots and bump caps, and not everyone who wore PPE put the equipment on at the brewery, the panel pointed out.
Rather, many employees frequently donned their PPE at home, and it’s not clear that “putting on your work boots instead of your personal sneakers before leaving the house is a compensable work activity,” the 4th Circuit noted. Courts can’t determine compensability without looking at individual employee behavior, it emphasized.
Also, in 2022, the Virginia Overtime Wage Act, which the plaintiffs cited as one of their principal causes of action, was changed to parrot the FLSA, clarifying that employees are not entitled to compensation for certain nonintegral pre-shift activities, the 4th Circuit said.
This meant that some putative class members would be subject to the pre-2022 legal standard, some to the post-2022 standard and some to both standards, the panel explained.
Similarly, “a whole swath of class members will never have been subject to [the Covid] protocols,” which ceased in February 2022, the panel added.
The district court abused its discretion in failing to consider these factual distinctions, the 4th Circuit held.
Class-action lawsuits seeking compensation for pre- and post-shift activities can lead to immense settlements. Last October, a class of current and former Target warehouse workers at distribution centers in New Jersey agreed to accept $4.6 million to settle state law claims they weren’t paid for walking long distances to and from their stations to undergo mandatory pre- and post-shift security screenings.
Target denied the allegations, particularly that the walking time was compensable, according to the lawsuit. A court preliminarily approved the settlement.
