18th Annual Workplace Class Action Report - 2022 Edition

Annual Workplace Class Action Litigation Report: 2022 Edition 609 make the legally required overtime payments. Id. at *10. Defendant for its part maintained that it had an independent contractor relationship with the subcontractor under the same test. Thus, the Fifth Circuit concluded that the District Court erred in failing to resolve these factual disputes because Defendant’s obligation to indemnify Plaintiff pursuant to the MSA turned in part on the subcontractor’s status. For these reasons, the Fifth Circuit reversed the District Court’s judgment in favor of Defendant. (xlvi) Injunctions In Class Actions Central Legal De La Raza, et al. v. Executive Office For Immigration Review, 2021 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 46050 (N.D. Cal. March 10, 2021). Plaintiffs, a group of non-profit legal services agencies and organizations that represent immigrants and refugees, brought a class action and sought a preliminary injunction challenging a Rule issued by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Executive Office of Immigration Review (“EOIR”). The Rule was proposed and finalized during the final months of the Trump Administration and made sweeping changes to the procedures and regulations governing immigration courts. Plaintiffs challenged 13 specific provisions of the Rule on the basis that the new provisions stripped away critical procedural protections for immigrants, impermissibly departed from long-standing practices by restricting the authority of immigration judges to grant relief to non-citizens in removal proceedings, and generally obstructed the ability of non-citizens and refugees to pursue relief from deportation, including humanitarian relief that Congress has explicitly provided for by statute, such as humanitarian visas for survivors of domestic violence and human trafficking. Plaintiffs asserted a number of claims under the Administrative Procedure Act and the due process clause of the U.S. Constitution. Specifically, Plaintiffs alleged that the unusually short 30-day comment period did not provide the public with sufficient time to comment on a rule of such magnitude, and that the Rule was the result of arbitrary and capricious decision-making. The Court granted Plaintiffs’ request for a nationwide preliminary injunction. As to it jurisdiction, the Court concluded that Plaintiffs’ claims were independent of or collateral to the removal process and that the Immigration and Nationality Act ("INA") did not preclude jurisdiction over Plaintiffs’ claims as Defendants urged. The Court determined that Plaintiffs had shown that they were likely to succeed on their claim that the notice process Defendants used to promulgate the Rule was deficient under the APA because: (i) the public was deprived of the opportunity to meaningfully review the proposed rule and provide informed comment, and (ii) the staggered nature of the rule-making in conjunction with other related rules resulted in an arbitrary and capricious failure to consider the combined impact of numerous intersecting policy changes. Second, the Court found that Plaintiffs had established that they would suffer irreparable harm if the injunction was not granted in that as a result of the Rule they were required to devote greater resources to completely revising education materials and conducting new trainings, and expending significantly more resources on cases. The end result would be that more non-citizens would be unrepresented and less likely to obtain relief to which they were entitled. Finally, the Court ruled that the public interest and the balance of equities weighed in favor of granting an injunction because the public interest was served by compliance with the APA. For these reasons the Court granted Plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction and enjoined implementation and enforcement of the Rule on a nationwide basis. Lazor, et al. v. University Of Connecticut , 2021 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 99490 (D. Conn. May 26, 2021). Plaintiffs, members of the women’s rowing team at the University of Connecticut ("UConn"), moved for a temporary restraining order enjoining the school from eliminating the women’s rowing team due to budgetary concerns. Plaintiffs asserted that UConn’s decision violated Title XI of the Education Amendments of 1972 ("Title IX"), and that a temporary restraining order was needed to maintain the status quo pending a ruling on their motion for a preliminary injunction. The Court granted the motion. It found that Plaintiffs established that they would suffer irreparable harm in the absence of injunctive relief and that there was a substantial likelihood of success on their Title IX claim. UConn announced in June 2020 that it would be eliminating the women’s rowing, men’s cross- country, men’s tennis, and men’s swimming and diving teams at the end of the 2021 school year due to budget deficits. Defendant contended that it was still compliant with Title IX under the first prong of the safe harbor, which provides that institutions are in compliance with their athletic teams if “substantially proportionate” opportunities are available for each sex. Defendant asserted that because the average size of female teams at UConn for the 2020-2021 academic year (28) was greater than what they contend was the participation gap (20), the university met that standard. The Court disagreed. It reasoned that Defendant’s argument was not found in any regulatory guidance, as the 1996 OCR Clarification, relevant here, merely provided that the average team size "may" be considered as a "frame of reference" in ascertaining the size of a viable team. Id . at