Class Actions Brief Blog

This blog often focuses on traditional, opt-out class actions brought under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23, but there is another common form of mass action: collective actions under the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. More than 5,000 collective action lawsuits are filed each year under the FLSA and ADEA, making those claims among the most popular forms of mass action and worthy of continued attention.

The FLSA and ADEA allow for aggregate litigation by providing that claims can be brought by employees on behalf of themselves and “other ...

If you’re an Uber rider, you’re probably familiar with Uber’s requests that you rate your driver. It’s a five-star rating system. Five is the best. One is the worst.

As it turns out, those ratings are vitally important to Uber drivers. Uber requires its drivers to maintain a minimum star rating.

This post is about how that rating system prompted a class action on racial discrimination — and about what a recent decision in that case teaches about how to prove classwide discrimination.

In 2015, Uber drivers in San Diego had to maintain a rating of at least 4.6 stars. A San Diego Uber ...

Last month, the United States House of Representatives passed the Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act, or the “FAIR Act.” The FAIR Act, should it be passed by the Senate and signed into law, would prohibit class action waivers and mandatory pre-dispute arbitration agreements in a wide range of disputes:

• Employment disputes that arise out of or relate to the work relationship or prospective work relationship, including disputes regarding discipline and/or termination of employment and terms of payment for advertising, recruiting, referrals and arrangements.
• Consumer ...

We often report in our monthly digests on cases asserting claims under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and state wage and hour laws. These cases generally involve claims that a company, often a restaurant or delivery service company, failed to pay overtime, used an improper “tip pool,” or treated workers as independent contractors, not employees. Resolving these cases can become complicated because they involve both a collective action and a class action.

Claims asserted under the FLSA are considered collective actions, not class actions. Collective actions ...

The Supreme Court began its new Term on October 5, and already the Court is slated to hear several cases that could have major impacts on class-action litigation. Among the issues facing the Court are:

▪ whether a defendant can render a putative class action moot by offering the named plaintiff all the relief the plaintiff could recover individually if the plaintiff were to prevail, even if the plaintiff rejects the offer (Campbell-Ewald Company v. Gomez);

▪ whether a plaintiff has standing to bring a claim (including a class claim) where the plaintiff’s statutory rights were ...

We have reported recently in this space on the certification of state wage and hour claims. Judge Gergel recently continued with this trend, certifying a class of Jamaican workers at the Kiawah Island Golf Resort who contend they weren’t paid enough by the Resort. See Moodie v. Kiawah Island Inn Co. LLC, No. 2:15-cv-1097 (D.S.C. Aug. 24, 2015). Defendants argued that the differences in class members were such that the court would have to certify six classes, but the Court rejected that notion, saying the argument stemmed from a “novel proposition that Plaintiffs must propose [a ...

In Johnson v. Amazon.com dedc LLC, No. 3:14-cv-01797 (D.S.C. May 2, 2014), seven South Carolina Amazon warehouse workers sued Amazon on behalf of themselves and similarly situated employees alleging unpaid overtime in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act (“FLSA”) at Amazon’s fulfillment centers in West Columbia and Spartanburg. Plaintiffs allege that they should be compensated for time spent going through “intensive and time-consuming security screening” to enter and exit the fulfillment centers (Compl. ¶35) and for similar security procedures at the start ...