18th Annual Workplace Class Action Report - 2022 Edition

Annual Workplace Class Action Litigation Report: 2022 Edition 249 that fire captains were always working in a managerial manner. Defendant contended that Plaintiffs were able to hire and fire employees, but Plaintiffs countered this characterization with the deposition testimony that neither fire captains nor lieutenants conducted performance evaluations. Thus, the Court held that there was a genuine dispute of material fact as to whether Plaintiffs fulfilled the executive-exemption elements. Finally, as to the administrative exemption, Defendant argued that the importance of Plaintiffs’ management responsibility exceeded the importance of their non-management activities, even if more time was spent on non-management activities. Id . at *13. Plaintiffs challenged that position with deposition testimony stating that each of the management responsibilities were insignificant and that their time spent doing non-management activities was more important to their job. The Court determined that the different understandings about what Plaintiffs’ primary duties were as they related to the performance of office or non-manual work directly related to the management of the enterprise, which thereby precluded summary judgment as to the administrative exemption. Accordingly, the Court ruled that the conflicting testimony as to the employees’ daily work duties left the question of whether or not the work fell within the administrative or executive exemption of the FLSA. Thus, the Court denied the parties’ motions for summary judgment. Ramirez, et al. v. Statewide Harvesting & Hauling, LLC, 997 F.3d 1356 (11th Cir. 2021) . Plaintiffs, a group of H-2A visa agricultural crew leaders, filed a collective action alleging that Defendant, a fruit-harvesting company, required its crew leaders to transport field workers between company-provided housing and a grocery store, laundromat, and bank every week without compensation in violation of the FLSA. Id . at 1357. Plaintiffs contended that crew leaders regularly worked up to 80 hours in a workweek without being paid overtime compensation. Following discovery, the parties filed cross-motions for summary judgement of the issue of whether Plaintiffs were exempt from the FLSA pursuant to the agricultural worker exemption. The District Court denied Defendant’s motion and granted Plaintiffs’ motion. On appeal, the Eleventh Circuit affirmed the District Court’s ruling. The District Court held that for the exemption to apply, the activities must be performed by a farmer or on a farm . Id . at 1358. The Eleventh Circuit agreed that Plaintiffs’ driving trips were not agricultural activities within the meaning of the FLSA. The Eleventh Circuit reasoned that the trips occurred off a farm, and they neither directly enabled harvesting or on-the-farm secondary activities nor were they physically tied to a farm. Id . at 1359. Further, the Eleventh Circuit determined that the trips could not be considered secondary agriculture activities, because they were not "incidental to or in conjunction with” primary farming operations because they were not connected to a single farming operation. Id . The Eleventh Circuit further opined that driving workers to a farm for harvesting would be connected to harvesting on that particular farm, but activities like the basic-necessities driving trips, which occurred completely off a farm and were tied to harvesting services for many different farms, would not be in conjunction with harvesting at any one farm. Id . at 1360. For these reasons, the Eleventh Circuit ruled that the District Court did not err in finding that the agriculture exemption did not apply to Plaintiffs, and it affirmed the ruling. Scott, et al. v. Antero Res. Corp., 2021 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 95855 (D. Colo. May 20, 2021). Plaintiffs, a group of drilling consultants, brought a wage & hour collective action alleging that Defendant misclassified them as independent contractors, which resulted in overtime violations pursuant to the FLSA. It was undisputed that Defendant paid its drilling consultants, who worked at indoor desks and did not perform manual labor, a day rate of at least $1,000 for a total of approximately $200,000 per calendar year. Plaintiffs contested Defendant’s claim that the drilling consultants were paid in regular intervals, but provided no evidence to support this claim and instead merely reiterated the fact that while Defendant paid Plaintiffs a day rate for each day worked, they were not guaranteed weekly compensation. The parties cross-moved for summary judgement and Defendant also brought a motion to decertify the previously certified collective action. The Court granted Defendant’s motion for summary judgment, and denied the remaining motions as moot. Defendant asserted that even if Plaintiffs were employees, they fell squarely within the FLSA’s highly compensated and administrative exemptions to overtime pay. Under the FLSA an employee is considered a “highly compensated,” and thus exempt from overtime, if the individual earns more than $100,000 in total compensation per year and performs administrative duties, as opposed to manual labor. Id . at *5. Further, an employee is not entitled to overtime under this exemption as long as he performs at least one or more duties typical of an exempt employee and is paid at least $455 per week on a “salary basis.” Id . At the outset the Court noted that neither party cited any binding Tenth Circuit authority to guide the analysis of the core issue in this case, i.e ., whether a sufficiently large day rate paid to Plaintiffs satisfied the salary basis requirement under the FLSA. Instead, both parties relied primarily on authority from the