Employer’s Attempt To Avoid Ongoing Collective Action By Forcing Potential Plaintiffs To Sign Arbitration Agreements Fails
This post has been viewed 3,904 times.
In the past year, if I wrote about “FLSA” and “arbitration” in the same post, it likely meant that another federal court had found employers can include class action waivers in their employment contracts without violating the Fair Labor Standards Act. Today, however, is different. The Eleventh Circuit last week found that it was the FLSA that gave the district court sufficient “managerial responsibility” over workers’ collective actions to override an employer’s coercive, post-lawsuit rollout of a new arbitration agreement. Billingsley v. Citi Trends, Inc., 2014 1199501 (11th Cir. March 25, 2014).
The collective action is made up of store managers at a clothing retailer, who allege the retailer systematically failed to compensate them for overtime. The putative class action was filed in February of 2012. By June of 2012 there was a preliminary scheduling order. Under Eleventh Circuit precedent, the plaintiff would start the process of notifying similarly-situated store managers 60 days after the scheduling order. In response, the retailer asked for extensions and then presented the court with new arbitration agreements executed by “several dozen” store managers. The store argued that these managers were now subject to arbitration and unable to join the court action. The plaintiffs objected and requested “corrective actions” (i.e., sanctions).
Read original articleTags: arbitration agreements, Fair Labor Standards, FLSA
Related Posts
