Labor & Employment Law Daily Wrap Up, WAGE-HOUR—CLASS ACTIONS—W.D. Ark.: Hospital denied decertification of collective action challenging automatic meal deduction policy, (Jan 22, 2025)

By Ronald Miller, J.D.

Of the six employees who were deposed, all six testified that they felt or were told that some break, even if it was less than 30 minutes, counted as a meal break.

A hospital was not entitled to decertification of an FLSA collective action brought by a patient care employee who challenged the hospital’s automatic meal deduction policy, ruled a federal district court in Arkansas. The employees presented proof that they suffered from a single FLSA-violating policy, so that they were similarly situated within the meaning of the FLSA. Accordingly, the employees will be permitted to litigate the issues of the hospital’s liability and willfulness. If they succeed in establishing liability, the hospital may renew its motion to decertify before trial on damages (Burris v. Baxter County Regional Hospital, Inc., No. 3:23-CV-3008 (W.D. Ark. Jan. 19, 2025)).

Meal deduction policy. A patient care provider brought a collective action under the FLSA challenging the hospital’s automatic meal deduction policy, which she claimed violated the FLSA. According to the policy, any employee who works at least six and one-half hours is expected to take at least a 30-minute meal break. The hospital automatically deducts 30 minutes from employees’ timecards to reflect this break—regardless of whether the employee actually takes a break.

According to employees, their patient-care obligations often prevented them from taking a 30-minute break. To address this fact, the hospital’s policy “requir[es] those employees to cancel the meal break deduction if their meal breaks were interrupted.” The hospital provides several methods for employees to cancel their meal break deduction, and the employees used those methods to cancel the deduction with varying frequency during their employment.

Interrupted meal breaks. The automatic meal deduction policy is not itself violative of the FLSA, and the employee did not allege as much. Instead, they alleged that the hospital had an unwritten policy of “discouraging its patient care providers from seeking compensation for meal breaks that were interrupted.” To enforce this policy, the employee alleged that the hospital explicitly or implicitly indicated that employees should not cancel the deduction if they got some break and chastised employees if deductions were canceled too frequently.

In July 2024, the court conditionally certified a collective action composed of hourly, non-exempt patient care providers who worked at the hospital and who received an automatic meal period deduction during the past three years. Over 100 hospital employees opted into the action.

Motion to decertify. The employer moved to decertify the collective, arguing that the named plaintiff cannot establish that she is similarly situated to the opt-in plaintiffs because they work in different departments and have different job duties, and she has failed to produce sufficient evidence of an unlawful policy.

The central question in determining if this collective action can proceed as such is whether the hospital’s hourly, non-exempt, patient care providers are “similarly situated.” “Plaintiffs may be similarly situated when ‘they suffer from a single, FLSA-violating policy, and when proof of that policy or of conduct in conformity with that policy proves a violation as to all the plaintiffs.’”

In deciding whether collective action is appropriate, the Eighth Circuit directs courts to consider such factors as: “(1) disparate factual and employment settings of the individual plaintiffs; (2) the various defenses available to defendant which appear to be individual to each plaintiff; [and] (3) fairness and procedural considerations.”

Employment setting. Here, the court found that the factual and employment settings of the opt-in plaintiffs were substantially similar with respect to the policy underlying their claim. Of the six employees who were deposed, all six testified that they felt or were told that some break, even if it was less than thirty minutes, counted as a meal break, and five out of six testified that they were verbally chastised in some manner for canceling the deduction too frequently.

Despite the employer’s argument that the employees were not similarly situated because they had different supervisors and worked in different departments, the court determined that the evidence was entirely consistent with a uniform policy. A reasonable jury could infer from the employees’ evidence that they experienced the same treatment across departments because there was such a policy. Therefore, the court found that proof of conduct in conformity with the alleged unlawful policy as to one plaintiff helps prove the existence of the alleged unlawful policy as to all plaintiffs, which supported collective action certification.

Individual defenses available to employer. The court rejected the employer’s contention that the availability of individualized defenses meant that the employees were not similarly situated. The court noted that the employer was not explicit about which individualized defenses are available to it or what evidence it had to support those defenses. Moreover, questions such as whether individuals actually worked uncompensated overtime, in which weeks, whether such work was de minimis, and whether their supervisors knew about it, can be adequately raised at trial with representative testimony and by bifurcating liability and damages.

Fairness and procedural considerations. Here, the central issue—whether the hospital had a policy of discouraging employees from accurately reporting time worked during automatically-deducted meal breaks—can be efficiently adjudicated on a collective basis, concluded the court. In rejecting the employer’s contention that this factor favored decertification, the court was not convinced that representative testimony was infeasible. While the type and scope of interruption may vary between departments, there was no reason that every opt-in plaintiff needed to testify about meal break interruptions when many of them were likely to work in the same departments.

Further, factual differences surrounding the work undertaken during meal breaks did not hinder efficient collective determination of the central issue, whether the hospital in fact had an unlawful policy. The bottom line was that the hospital had not identified any persuasive reason why individual lawsuits would be a superior method of resolving the employees’ claims.

The case is No. 3:23-CV-3008.

Judge: Brooks, T.

Attorneys: Christopher Burks (WH Law) for Angel Burris. Jane A. Kim (Wright Lindsey Jennings) for Baxter County Regional Hospital, Inc. dba Baxter Health.

Companies: Baxter County Regional Hospital, Inc.; Baxter Health

Cases: WageHour ClassActions WorkingTime Overtime ArkansasNews