Posted August 28, 2014
On Monday, the Eight Circuit Court of Appeals awarded $5.8 million to a class of Tyson Food employees who sued for overtime pay, according to a Meating Place article by Tom Johnston available here. Courthouse News Service also published an article available here and Law 360 here.
The case involves more than 3,000 current and former hourly workers from the company’s Storm Lake, Iowa, plant. The complaint was issued in 2007 and stated that Tyson’s policy of adding several minutes per day to each employee’s paycheck to account for donning and doffing gear was insufficient.
In 2006, lead plaintiff Adelina Garcia and several hundred other employees from a Tyson facility in Finney County, Kansas, filed a proposed class action in the Kansas federal court. The plaintiffs claimed violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and Kansas Wage Protection Act for being underpaid for tasks, including putting on and taking off of shin guards, mesh aprons, belly guards, plexiglass arm guards and knocker vests, and other tasks, according to Courthouse News Service.
The jury granted $500,000 in damages and then the trial court awarded more than $3.3 million in attorneys’ fees under the FLSA.
In his dissent, Circuit Judge C. Arlen Beam said that the workers were not eligible for class certification because commonality under Rule 23 requires that all class members suffered the same injury, and that the FSLA class was conditionally certified for workers only in one of the departments, but that “conditional” portion was never revisited, according to Law 360.
“Here we have undifferentiated presentations of evidence, including significant numbers of the putative classes suffering no injury and members of the entire classes suffering wide variations in damages, ultimately resulting in a single-sum classwide verdict from which each purported class member, damaged or not, will receive a pro-rata portion of the jury’s one-figure verdict,” Judge Beam said.
For more information, please view the case here.
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