The whole point of the Supreme Court’s decision in Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes was to put an end to “trial by formula” class actions that stack the deck against defendants. Lower courts, unfortunately, haven’t gotten the message. And that is a serious threat to defendants’ due process rights. Fortunately, the Supreme Court will return to the issue next term in Tyson Foods, Inc. v. Bouaphakeo.
There is a whiff of parody to the case. The plaintiff class consists of about 1,300 workers at Tyson’s Storm Lake, Iowa, pork-processing plant who say that Tyson failed to compensate them for the overtime that they spent putting on and taking off protective gear before and after their shifts. The class was certified as presenting “common” fact questions despite that the plant has some 420 job classifications, each of which has different protective requirements, not to mention that Tyson provides additional gear that employees may choose to wear—so even workers in the same department or at the same position may wind up wearing different equipment.
Logically, one would expect the plaintiffs to present evidence of the amount of time that they each spent putting on and taking off gear, compare that to the work and pay records kept by Tyson, and then show that they weren’t properly compensated for any time they worked over 40 hours in a given week, which the Fair Labor Standards Act sets as the trigger for overtime. After all, that’s how it would work in an individual suit.
But that’s nothing like what happened here.