provisions of the defendant’s standard contract violated the TVPA and whether thedefendant maintained an illegal policy or practice of failing to pay nurses the prevailingwage, including by paying minimum wage during “orientation” periods and bydiscounting 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 ofadjudication due to the straightforward common questions of fact and law concerningstandard employment contracts. For these reasons, the court granted the plaintiffs’motion for class certification.C.Rulings Granting Class Certification On Constitutional ClaimsLabor advocates often ground their class actions on constitutional theories too. A keyexample 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 Latinoworkers, filed a class action alleging that the defendants, various immigration officials,violated their constitutional rights during a federal raid at a meatpacking plant. Theplaintiffs filed a motion for class certification pursuant to Rule 23, and the court grantedthe motion. The plaintiffs alleged that the defendants had a single plan in place in whichthey orchestrated the arrest of undocumented individuals who appeared to be Latino.The court found that the plaintiffs offered sufficient evidence indicating that thedefendants had standard, common instructions that were carried out against the classmembers in equal measure. Further, the court determined that all class members weretargeted due to being Latino, all were treated in the same allegedly illegal manner, andall were detained due to the defendants’ actions. The defendants asserted that classcertification should be denied because each worker would be required to individuallyshow 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 thecommon plan for a conspiratorial action in planning and executing the raid. The courtalso opined that the defendants were all trained on the common policy and were actingupon the policy in subjecting the workers to the alleged illegal treatment. The courtconcluded that the plaintiffs sufficiently established that the defendants’ actions wereapplied uniformly across the class. The court also held that a class action would be thesuperior method of adjudication because proceeding as a class action would likely bethe only manner in which the plaintiffs could obtain a remedy because most were “lowincome and geographically dispersed across the United States and South and CentralAmerica, and many do not possess the English skills necessary to navigate theAmerican legal system.” Id. at *30. For these reasons, the court granted the plaintiffs’motion for class certification.D.Rulings Denying Class CertificationThe 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 thedefendant violated the TVPA. The plaintiffs filed a motion for class certification pursuantto Rule 23 following discovery, and the court denied the motion. Plaintiffs soughtcertification of a class consisting of all Mexican nationals employed by the defendant in240© Duane Morris LLP 2023Duane Morris Class Action Review – 2023
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