Duane Morris Class Action Review - 2023 - Report - Page 241
provisions of the defendant’s standard contract violated the TVPA and whether the
defendant maintained an illegal policy or practice of failing to pay nurses the prevailing
wage, including by paying minimum wage during “orientation” periods and by
discounting nurses’ wages for breaks that they were not actually afforded. Id. at *26.
Finally, the court opined that a class action would be the superior method of
adjudication due to the straightforward common questions of fact and law concerning
standard employment contracts. For these reasons, the court granted the plaintiffs’
motion for class certification.
C.
Rulings Granting Class Certification On Constitutional Claims
Labor advocates often ground their class actions on constitutional theories too. A key
example of a successful theory in 2022 is Zelaya, et al. v. Hammer, 2022 U.S. Dist.
LEXIS 205048 (E.D. Tenn. Aug. 9, 2022). In this case, the plaintiffs, a group of Latino
workers, filed a class action alleging that the defendants, various immigration officials,
violated their constitutional rights during a federal raid at a meatpacking plant. The
plaintiffs filed a motion for class certification pursuant to Rule 23, and the court granted
the motion. The plaintiffs alleged that the defendants had a single plan in place in which
they orchestrated the arrest of undocumented individuals who appeared to be Latino.
The court found that the plaintiffs offered sufficient evidence indicating that the
defendants had standard, common instructions that were carried out against the class
members in equal measure. Further, the court determined that all class members were
targeted due to being Latino, all were treated in the same allegedly illegal manner, and
all were detained due to the defendants’ actions. The defendants asserted that class
certification should be denied because each worker would be required to individually
show how the alleged action occurred and how their constitutional rights were violated.
The court rejected the defendants’ argument. It found that the relevant question was the
common plan for a conspiratorial action in planning and executing the raid. The court
also opined that the defendants were all trained on the common policy and were acting
upon the policy in subjecting the workers to the alleged illegal treatment. The court
concluded that the plaintiffs sufficiently established that the defendants’ actions were
applied uniformly across the class. The court also held that a class action would be the
superior method of adjudication because proceeding as a class action would likely be
the only manner in which the plaintiffs could obtain a remedy because most were “low
income and geographically dispersed across the United States and South and Central
America, and many do not possess the English skills necessary to navigate the
American legal system.” Id. at *30. For these reasons, the court granted the plaintiffs’
motion for class certification.
D.
Rulings Denying Class Certification
The plaintiffs’ class certification theories failed to succeed in 2022 in Garcia, et al. v.
Stemilt AG Services, LLC, 2022 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 125068 (E.D. Wash. July 14, 2022).
The plaintiffs, a group of H2-A farm workers, filed a class action alleging that the
defendant violated the TVPA. The plaintiffs filed a motion for class certification pursuant
to Rule 23 following discovery, and the court denied the motion. Plaintiffs sought
certification of a class consisting of all Mexican nationals employed by the defendant in
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Duane Morris Class Action Review – 2023
