09-2020 & 09-2021 Alvarez v. City of Chicago

Listen to this article

Employment
FLSA

It was error to order employees’ claims under the FLSA to proceed through arbitration rather than collective action.

“A district court has wide discretion to manage collective actions. See Hoffmann-La Roche v. Sperling, 493 U.S. 165, 171 (1989). However, it appears that here the district court may have mistakenly read Jonites to forbid it from adopting a subclaim approach merely because the variety of subclaims renders the class ‘heterogenous.’ The problem with the Jonites class, however, was not that the plaintiffs had different subclaims, but rather that determining whether any given plaintiff had a viable claim depended on a detailed, fact-specific inquiry, and many plaintiffs lacked any conceivably viable claim altogether. Jonites, 522 F.3d at 723, 725-26; see also Mooney v. Aramco Services Co., 54 F.3d 1207, 1214-15 (5th Cir. 1995), overruled on other grounds by Desert Palace, Inc. v. Costa, 539 U.S. 90 (2003) (affirming decertification of collective action where employees who brought ADEA claim were subject to ‘vastly disparate employment situations’ and defense was likely to center on purported reasonable factors other than age specific to each employee). If common questions predominate, the plaintiffs may be similarly situated even though the recovery of any given plaintiff may be determined by
only a subset of those common questions.”

Reversed.

09-2020 & 09-2021 Alvarez v. City of Chicago

Appeals from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Hibbler, J., Flaum, J.

Full Text