130 Litigating CA Wage & Hour and Labor Code Class Actions (22nd Edition) Seyfarth Shaw LLP | www.seyfarth.com The first published appellate decision to apply Pioneer to the wage and hour context was Belaire-West Landscape, Inc. v. Superior Court.758 In that case, the appellate court went even further than Pioneer, requiring the defendant to release the addresses and personal telephone numbers of all current and former employees who did not affirmatively opt out in response to a pre-certification class notice. Moreover, in contrast to the plaintiff in Pioneer, who sought information only on those putative class members who had affirmatively complained about the product at issue, the Belaire-West plaintiff sought personal information of all current and former employees within the putative class. Two decisions that followed in the wake of Belaire-West have extended its holding to broaden the plaintiffs’ rights to contact information. Indeed, the decisions have led many plaintiffs’ lawyers to contend that they always have the right to the putative class members’ contact information and that the trial court has discretion to skip the Belaire-West process altogether. First, in Puerto v. Superior Court,759 the Court of Appeal held that it was an abuse of discretion for the trial court to require consent from putative class members before releasing their personal contact information, when the defendant had responded to discovery by listing each putative class member as a witness with information relevant to the case. Puerto held that “the right to privacy in contact information is unlikely to trump the [plaintiffs’] right to investigate their claims by contacting witnesses.”760 Because of the unusual fact that the defendant had listed every putative class member by name and attested in verified discovery responses that each person was a percipient witness, Puerto could be distinguished from the typical class action.761 In the second decision, Crab Addison, Inc. v. Superior Court,762 the Court of Appeal went even further, and held that a procedure by which putative class members had to affirmatively agree to the disclosure of their contact information was not permissible even where (1) the employer had not listed the employees as witnesses or otherwise disclosed their names and (2) the employees had signed a form indicating they did not wish to have their personal information released—including specifically in connection with “class action lawsuits.” Crab Addison found that employees, in signing the release form, would not realize that the form might encompass a class action aimed at vindicating their own Labor Code rights, and that “public policy concerns weigh in favor of enforcing unwaivable statutory wage and overtime rights through class action litigation over a right to privacy.”763 758 149 Cal. App. 4th 554 (2007). 759 158 Cal. App. 4th 1242 (2008). 760 Id. at 1248. 761 Puerto was followed by a federal district court in Stone v. Advance America, 2010 WL 5892501 (S.D. Cal. Sept. 21, 2010). In Stone, the district court had previously allowed the plaintiff to obtain class-member contact information through notice and an opt-out procedure. Thereafter, the plaintiff propounded interrogatories requesting the identities and contact information for defendant’s former employees during the class period. The district court held that no notice or opt-out procedure was required to obtain this information under Rule 26 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, because the plaintiff sought only basic discovery, i.e., the names and contact information for percipient witnesses, which the court distinguished from the names and contact information of class members (even though there was substantial overlap between the two). 762 169 Cal. App. 4th 958, 973-74 (2008). 763 Id. at 974 (citing Puerto v. Superior Court, 158 Cal. App. 4th 1242, 1259 (2008)).
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTkwMTQ4