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U.S. Supreme Court Hears Tyson’s Overtime Case

4 min read

The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments earlier this month in a case brought by Tyson Foods Inc. that challenges a nearly $6 million class-action award involving overtime pay at its Iowa pork processing plant.

Tyson, headquartered in Springdale, challenged the appropriate use of statistical analysis to estimate the amount of overtime owed to the class of 3,334 current and formers employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Tyson also said that some of the class members weren’t entitled to the damages because they didn’t work overtime.

“The federal courts have no authority to provide damages to individuals with no injury,” Tyson said in its court filing. The judgment upholding the award by the court of appeals should be reversed, the company said.

“We were initially involved in this case because federal wage and hour laws are not precise in determining how to compensate certain activities,” Tyson spokesman Gary Mickelson said in a statement to Arkansas Business.

“However, we’re now addressing another aspect of the case: whether there’s enough evidence for the case to be certified as a collective or a class action. Since even the federal courts of appeal are divided over the requirements necessary to be part of such cases, we asked the U.S. Supreme Court to get involved.”

During oral arguments, the justices focused on the use of statistical evidence in estimating the amount of overtime owed to the class members, said Sachin Pandya, professor of law at the University of Connecticut. Pandya teaches employment law and filed a brief in the case supporting the workers.

Tyson didn’t keep records noting how long it took workers to put on and take off their protective gear for the job, he said. So the plaintiffs relied on a time study done by the plaintiffs’ experts “that purported to show the ‘average’ amount of time Tyson employees spent on donning/doffing-related activities,” Tyson said in its filing.

The protein producer charged that “this purported proof would result in a ‘trial by formula’” that the Supreme Court prohibited in its decision in Wal-Mart Stores v. Dukes in 2011. In that case, the Supreme Court blocked the largest sex discrimination lawsuit in U.S. history, saying that there were too many women in too many jobs at Wal-Mart to place into one class-action lawsuit.

Pandya said that Tyson is facing the problem because it didn’t keep the time records. “If they had kept records, … then much of the fight in this case wouldn’t have happened because we would know how many hours each particular employee in the class worked,” he said.

The Supreme Court ruled decades ago that plaintiffs in FLSA cases could rely on a reasonable inference based on statistical proof of time worked when employers didn’t keep records, said Maria Glover, associate professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center, where she teaches civil procedure and complex litigation. She joined a brief filed at the Supreme Court that supports the workers.

Glover said she doesn’t think Tyson is going to win the case. “Tyson is upset about the statistical evidence,” she said. “Well, Tyson was supposed to keep records and it didn’t. The law says when employers don’t keep records, they don’t get to dodge liability.”

Issue of Overtime

Richard Painter, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, said he was troubled that some employees were members of the class even though they didn’t work more than 40 hours.

And it will be difficult to determine how much to pay the employees who worked overtime but weren’t properly paid, said Painter, who teaches corporate law. “Ultimately, there’s going to be clear and convincing evidence that each person collects something from this actually suffered harm,” Painter said.

Still, a class-action lawsuit might not have been the best way to handle the worker complaints about not being paid overtime. Painter would rather have seen the complaints go to the U.S. Department of Labor, where the issue could have been handled through regulation. A class action “is an extremely inefficient way to resolve this type of a problem as opposed to the Department of Labor saying cut it out,” he said.

A ruling from the Supreme Court is expected in the spring.

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