Dive Brief:
- The U.S. Supreme Court is hearing the class-action lawsuit brought up by thousands of workers at an Iowa processing plant against Tyson Foods. The workers wanted Tyson to pay them for the time it took to don their work gear and other work-related tasks.
- Tyson objected to these claims, pointing to the court’s 2011 decision in Wal-Mart Stores v. Dukes, an employment discrimination class-action that rejected what it called 'trial by formula.'
- The workers may have the upper hand in this case, as "Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, whose vote will probably prove crucial, suggested that the defendant, Tyson Foods, had committed litigation missteps that could doom its case," according to The New York Times. "I just don’t understand your arguments," Justice Kennedy told one of Tyson's lawyers.
Dive Insight:
"Tyson had not kept records, and the workers tried to prove their damages based on an expert witness’s statistical inferences from hundreds of videotaped observations of how long it took the workers to get ready," The New York Times reported.
The workers' tasks did not share enough in common for them to pursue their claims together, Carter G. Phillips, a lawyer for Tyson, said. Phillips said the case concerned "more than 400 jobs, which required widely differing amounts of time to perform their donning, doffing and washing tasks."
"The jury was told in this case that they could only rely on representative evidence if all of the employees performed substantially similar activities, and that substantial similarity is what we think is the proper standard to determine whether an inference here would be just and reasonable," said Elizabeth B. Prelogar, a federal government lawyer arguing in defense of workers.
In August, Tyson won a reversal of a similar case in Nebraska, where hourly workers said they did not receive pay for time spent performing pre- and post-shift tasks at their plants, which amounted to $24 million in damages that would have been awarded to those workers. Last month, Tyson announced it would raise wages for most of its chicken plant workers.