18th Annual Workplace Class Action Report - 2022 Edition

264 Annual Workplace Class Action Litigation Report: 2022 Edition Court held that Bristol-Myers applied here, and it must apply its reasoning as binding precedent. The Court therefore ruled that it lacked personal jurisdiction over the non-New Mexico Plaintiffs. The Court directed Plaintiffs to determine whether they would like to proceed collectively with solely New Mexico-based Plaintiffs, or transfer the entire case to Delaware, where Defendant was incorporated and therefore may be subject to general jurisdiction on all claims from the nationwide collective action. Id . at *11. Canaday, et al. v. The Anthem Companies Inc., 2021 U.S. App. LEXIS 24523 (6th Cir. Aug. 17, 2021). Plaintiff, a nurse who lived in Tennessee, filed a collective action under the FLSA in Tennessee. Plaintiff asserted that Defendant misclassified her and other similarly-situated nurses as exempt from the FLSA’s overtime pay provisions. From its headquarters in Indiana, Defendant offered a host of health-related insurance policies, and through its subsidiaries Defendant paid nurses to conduct utilization reviews in order to assess the necessity of medical procedures under each health plan. A number of nurses in states outside of Tennessee and across the country opted-in to the collective action in order to challenge Defendant’s policy of treating the nurses as exempt from the FLSA’s overtime provisions. Plaintiff moved for conditional certification of a collective action comprised of all utilization review nurses. Defendant moved to dismiss the out-of-state nurses from the case on the basis that the District Court did not have personal jurisdiction over Defendant. The District Court granted Defendant’s motion and dismissed the non-resident Plaintiffs, leaving a collective action comprised only of Tennessee-based nurses. On Plaintiff’s interlocutory appeal, the Sixth Circuit affirmed the District Court’s dismissal order. The Sixth Circuit held that the District Court did not err by dismissing the out-of-state Plaintiffs on personal jurisdiction grounds because the non-resident Plaintiffs did not satisfy the requirements for jurisdiction under Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. v. Superior Court , 137 S. Ct. 1773, 1781 (2017). Because Defendant was based in Indiana, not Tennessee, the Sixth Circuit concluded that the District Court could not exercise general jurisdiction over Defendant. As such, in order to exercise specific jurisdiction over Defendant, the District Court needed to find that there was a connection between the forum and the specific claims at issue. Specifically, the Sixth Circuit determined that because the out-of-state Plaintiffs did not bring claims arising out of or relating to Defendant’s conduct in the forum state of Tennessee, the District Court was unable to exercise specific personal jurisdiction over claims unrelated Defendant’s conduct in the forum State of Tennessee. In so ruling, the Sixth Circuit reasoned that the principles animating the application of Bristol-Myers to mass actions under California law applied with equal force to FLSA collective actions under federal law. The Sixth Circuit opined that an FLSA collective action is more accurately described as a kind of mass action, in which aggrieved workers act as a group of individual plaintiffs with individual cases. The Sixth Circuit was unpersuaded by each of Plaintiff’s arguments against dismissal, including her claim that she did not have to show that the out of state Plaintiffs’ claims arose out of Defendant’s contacts with Tennessee because they filed federal claims in federal court. As a result, the Sixth Circuit held that the District Court properly concluded that it could not exercise specific personal jurisdiction over claims unrelated Defendant’s conduct in the forum State of Tennessee, and it affirmed the District Court’s dismissal order. Martinez, et al. v. Tyson Foods, 2021 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 6730 (N.D. Tex. April 7, 2021). Plaintiff filed a collective action alleging that Defendant failed to pay overtime compensation in violation of the FLSA. Plaintiff filed a motion for conditional certification of a collective action consisting of all production supervisors. During the motion’s pendency, the Fifth Circuit formally adopted a new approach for analyzing conditional certification motions in Swales v. KLLM Transportation Services, L.L.C. , 985 F.3d 430 (5th Cir. 2021). In light of Swales , the Court denied without prejudice Plaintiff’s motion for conditional certification and a renewed motion following Swales . Defendant thereafter filed a motion to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction pursuant to Rule 12(b)(2). Defendant argued that the Court lacked personal jurisdiction over it with respect to the FLSA claims of out-of- state putative collective action members and, accordingly, those claims should be dismissed. Plaintiff asserted that the Court need only have personal jurisdiction over herself on behalf of the collective action members. The Court agreed with Defendant’s position that it lacked personal jurisdiction over the out-of-state putative collective action members. The Court reasoned that should conditional certification be granted, the out-of-state collective action members who opted-in would be real parties in interest who joined with an in-state Plaintiff to pursue claims based on similar conduct that occurred somewhere else. Id. at *10. Since there was no affiliation between the potential out-of-state Plaintiffs’ claims and Texas, the Court determined that it also lacked specific jurisdiction. The Court therefore dismissed the claims of the out-of-state potential collective action members.