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Nature of Suit Code: 891
Nature of Suit: Agricultural Acts
Cause of Action: 

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United States Court of Appeals

FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT

Argued March 22, 1996 Decided May 28, 1996

No. 95-5044

NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED

PEOPLE, JEFFERSON COUNTY BRANCH, ET AL.,

APPELLEES

v.

UNITED STATES SUGAR CORPORATION AND SUGAR CANE GROWERS COOPERATIVE OF FLORIDA,

APPELLANTS

Consolidated with

95-5110

-

Appeals from the United States District Court

for the District of Columbia

(82cv02315)

Vincent C. Costantino, Assistant Counsel, U.S. Department of Labor, and John M. Simpson argued

the causesfor appellants. With them on the briefs were Eric H. Holder, Jr., United States Attorney,

R. Craig Lawrence and Michael J. Ryan, Assistant United States Attorneys, Harry L. Sheinfeld,

Counsel, U.S. Department of Labor, and Robert A. Burgoyne.

Edward J. Tuddenham argued the cause for appellees. With him on the brief was Robert A. Williams.

Bruce Goldstein and Shelley Davis entered appearances.

Before: GINSBURG, RANDOLPH, and TATEL, Circuit Judges.

Opinion for the Court filed by Circuit Judge RANDOLPH.

RANDOLPH, Circuit Judge: In 1982, the Jefferson County Branch of the National Association

for the Advancement of Colored People and six named farm workers filed this class action against

the Department of Labor in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Fourteen

years, three dismissals, and six Secretaries of Labor later, these plaintiffs ask usto send this case back

to that court for a hearing on the Department's interpretation of regulations governing certifications

no longer sought for workers no longer employed under a pay system no longer in place for a

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harvesting method no longer in use. We must decline the invitation.

I

This tale of government regulation, grower certification and perpetual litigation began with

apples. In 1982, plaintiffs challenged the Department's interpretation of its temporary foreign worker

programas applied to certain West Virginia apple growers. The program allowed a grower to import

foreign farm workers only upon the Department's certification that there were not enough domestic

workers to meet the grower's needs and that importing foreign workers would not adversely affect

the wages and working conditions ofsimilarly situated domestic farm workers. To implement wage

protection, the Department each year calculated something called the "adverse effect wage rate," or

"AEWR," an hourly wage which growers had to promise to pay both domestic and foreign workers

in order to receive foreign-worker certification.

The AEWR worked well enough for growers who paid workers by the hour, but it presented

an opportunityfor abuse by growers who paid workers by the piece. Consider, for instance, a grower

operating under a piece-rate system who promises to meet an AEWR of $5 per hour by paying 50

cents per bushel of apples picked. This would be acceptable only if an average farm worker picked

10 bushels per hour. But what if the AEWR increased the following year to $6 per hour? Then the

grower could purport to meet it either by raising the rate to 60 cents per bushel or by representing

that the average farm worker would pick 12, rather than 10, bushels per hour. To prevent the latter,

the Department promulgated a regulation requiring growersto raise their rates, not their productivity

expectations, when the AEWR increased. 20 C.F.R. § 655.207(c).

In their 1982 complaint, the plaintiffs alleged that the Department misinterpreted this

regulation when it preliminarily certified West Virginia apple growers despite the fact that they had

effectively increased their productivity expectations from one year to the next by changing the

piece-rate from a per-bushel to a per-box basis. The district court agreed, ultimately entering a

judgment interpreting the regulation to preclude the West Virginia apple growers from increasing

their productivityexpectations above the originallevelstheyproposed in 1977 and to require growers

to increase their piece-ratesin proportion to the annual increasesin the AEWR. NAACP v. Donovan,

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558 F. Supp. 218 (D.D.C. 1982). The court then ordered the Department to condition all future

foreign-worker certifications upon the applicant's conforming to those requirements. Id.

Thus ended the apple phase of the case. The sugar cane phase began in 1986, when the

plaintiffssome of whom worked as both apple-pickers and sugar-cane cuttersfiled a motion for

further relief alleging that the Department was not enforcing its piece-rate regulations in the sugar

cane industry. At the time, Florida sugar cane growers paid their workers according to a "task-rate"

system. Under it, workers were paid per row of sugar cane harvested, with the value of any particular

row adjusted to reflect the degree of difficulty in harvesting it. The Department argued that this

task-rate system was not a piece-rate system and therefore was not subject to the regulation. The

Department conceded, however, that the administrative record was not adequate to resolve the issue,

and on September 25, 1986, the district court ordered it to gather the information necessary to

determine how the sugar cane growers paid their workers, whether that method amounted to a

piece-rate system, and if it did, whether the rates paid under that method comported with the court's

1982 decision.

The Department responded with a draft report in 1987. It took another five years for the

Department to prepare the final version of the report; the delay was due, in large part, to battles

between the plaintiffs and sugar growers over the third-party discovery the district court had granted

the plaintiffs in order to prepare their response to the draft report. During the delay, the Department

replaced the original piece-rate regulation, 20 C.F.R. § 655.207(c), with a new one, 20 C.F.R. §

655.202(B)(2). In response, the district court allowed the plaintiffs to file a second supplemental

complaint challenging both regulations, and then permitted United States Sugar Corporation and the

Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative ("the growers") to intervene in the case. But when the plaintiffs

attempted to add the intervenors as defendants, the district court decided that, because the

Department wasstill preparing itsfinalreport, the case should be dismissed without prejudice subject

to the plaintiffs' "right to reopen the case" by telephoning the court's clerk anytime after April 1993,

the court's deadline for the Department to finish its report.

Seven months after the April 1993 deadline passed, the Department finished the report and

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filed it with the district court. The Department found that the sugar growers did not pay their

workers by a piece-rate and that the certifications granted those growers therefore had not violated

either the original or the new piece-rate regulation. The plaintiffs immediately filed a motion to

re-open the case. In response, the Department and the growers moved to dismiss on various

jurisdictionalgrounds. During a hearing on the morning of December 16, 1993, the district court said

it would dismiss the case again. Later that day, the court reconsidered and issued an order vacating

the dismissal and setting a briefing schedule "to govern the final disposition of this case."

Two months later, the district court issued an opinion and order rejecting the jurisdictional

argumentsthe defendants had raised before the dismissal and reinstatement. NAACPv. United States

Sec'y of Labor, 846 F. Supp. 91 (D.D.C. 1994). Thereafter, all of the parties filed motions for

summary judgment. On September 22, 1994, the district court granted the farm workers' motion for

summaryjudgment "but onlyto the extent that the conclusions within the Department ofLabor's Final

Report cannot be upheld." NAACP v. United States Sec'y of Labor, 865 F. Supp. 903, 926 (D.D.C.

1994). In an accompanying opinion, the court rejected the report's conclusions as arbitrary and

capricious, id. at 910, and identified certain issues left to be resolved in light of that rejection, id. at

922. The court said it was prepared to conduct an evidentiary hearing to take testimony on those

issues, id. at 925, and it directed the partiesto file a joint pleading setting out "an orderly framework

for the presentation of all necessary issues." Id. at 927. Upon receiving the joint pleading, the court

entered an order scheduling discovery, dispositive motions, and an evidentiary hearing. The growers

responded by filing an emergency writ of mandamus and something they called a "protective notice

of appeal." We denied the mandamus relief on November 17, 1994, and dismissed the appeal on

March 8, 1995.

On December 22, 1994, the Department filed in the district court a renewed motion for

summary judgment. The motion prompted the third dismissal of the case: on February 6, 1995, the

district court, apparentlyreconsidering the need for anevidentiaryhearing, dismissed the casewithout

prejudice and remanded it to the Department for consideration of the remaining issues raised in the

court's September 22 order. NAACPv. United States Sec'y of Labor, Civ. No. 82-2315 (D.D.C. Feb.

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6, 1995). The Department and the growers filed timely notices of appeal.

II

As a threshold matter, the plaintiffs challenge this court's jurisdiction to hear these appeals.

This court has jurisdiction over appeals of "final decisions of the district courts." 28 U.S.C. § 1291.

The plaintiffs argue, however, that the district court's February 6, 1995, dismissal ofthe case was not

a "final decision" because the district court simultaneously remanded the case to the Department.

A remand order usually is not a final decision, Occidental Petroleum Corp. v. SEC, 873 F.2d

325, 329 (D.C. Cir. 1989), even if the district court dismisses the case when it remands. American

Hawaii Cruises v. Skinner, 893 F.2d 1400, 1403 (D.C. Cir. 1990). However, such an order is

reviewable in this court "when the agency to which the case isremanded seeksto appeal and it would

have no opportunity to appeal after the proceeding on remand." Occidental Petroleum, 873 F.2d at

330; see also American Hawaii Cruises, 893 F.2d at 1402 n.*; Gueory v. Hampton, 510 F.2d 1222,

1225 (D.C. Cir. 1974).

The situation described in Occidental Petroleum is precisely the situation here. In its

remand/dismissal order, the district court made clear to the Department that it should "provide an

explanation for," "re-examine very seriously," and "re-evaluate" certain of its conclusions, "examine

carefully" certain data offered by the plaintiffs, and "take what we in the law call a "hard look' at this

case." As we explained in Occidental, an agencyconfronted with such a remand order "has no choice

but to conduct its proceedings and to render its decision pursuant to that [order]. Unless another

party appeals [the agency's resulting] decision, the correctness of the district court's legal ruling will

never be reviewed by the court of appeals, notwithstanding the agency's conviction that the ruling is

erroneous." 873 F.2d at 330. To avoid that situation here, the rule of Occidental gives us

jurisdiction to hear the Department's appeal now.

The growers' appeal raises a different question. Unlike the Department, if the growers are

unhappywith the Department's proceedings on remand, they may challenge those proceedingsand

the remand order requiring themafter those proceedings have come to an end. Thus, the

Occidental rule does not apply to their appeal. See Occidental Petroleum, 873 F.2d at 324

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(acknowledging that while "a private partymaynot, inmost cases, immediatelyappeal a district court

order remanding a case for further agency proceedings, the agency may do so"). Nonetheless, what

mattersfor the purposes of our appellate jurisdiction is whether the district court's decisionand not

any particular party challenging itis properly before us, which it is as a result of the Department's

appeal. We therefore may also consider the growers' arguments against that decision. Cf. Railway

Labor Executives' Ass'n v. United States, 987 F.2d 806, 810 (D.C. Cir. 1993).

The plaintiffsraise one other challenge to this court'sjurisdiction to review the district court's

February 6, 1995, order. Even if the order is appealable, they say, subsequent events have made any

appealfromit moot. In the order, the district court dismissed the case "without prejudice to the right

ofthe Plaintiffs, the Defendants or the Defendant-Intervenorsto re-open" it bytelephoning the court's

clerk on or before June 30, 1995. The plaintiffs take this as a deadline for the Department to respond

to the remand order; now that the date has passed, the remand order is, they say, "a dead letter."

We have a different view. Although the order set a deadline for requests to re-open the case, it set

no timetable for the Department's response to the remand order. Given the pace of this litigation, it

is no surprise that the Department's response has not yet come. In a June 6, 1995, letter to counsel

and the district court, the Department said it planned to defer further action on the court's remand

order until the conclusion of related litigation pending in the state courts of Florida. The remand

order may be stagnant, but it is still alive. The appeal cannot, therefore, be moot, and the balance of

this opinion will be devoted to deciding it.

In their second supplemental complaint, the plaintiffs sought both prospective and

retrospective relief. They asked the district court first to find that the sugar cane growers' task-rate

system was actually a piece-rate system subject to the Department's piece-rate regulation, then to

enjoin the Department from granting foreign-worker certification to any sugar cane grower unless

the grower (1) complies with the piece-rate regulations and (2) agrees to provide back pay to the

workers to compensate them for past violations of those regulations. Largely because this case has

taken so long to unfold, the plaintiffs' claim for prospective reliefis now moot, and they lack standing

to maintain their claim for retrospective relief.

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In the ten years since the sugar cane phase of this case began, the Florida sugar cane industry

has undergone dramatic change. In an agreement reached with farm worker representatives before

the 1992 harvesting season, U.S. Sugar Corporation abandoned the task-rate system at the heart of

this case and began paying workers on a per-ton basis using estimates of tonnage cut, with

adjustments made after the cane was weighed at the mill. During the 1992-93 harvesting season, the

Department determined that this "per-ton" system had become the prevailing method of payment.

As such, it became mandatory on all growers seeking foreign-worker certification for the 1993-94

season.

At least partly as a result of that requirement, most of the sugar growers who historically had

sought foreign-worker certification declined to do so beginning with the 1993-94 season. Instead,

they shifted to mechanized harvesting. Only U.S. Sugar stuck with the "per-ton" system for the

1994-95 season, but it too then shifted to mechanized harvesting. Thus, since the end of the 1994-95

season, no sugar grower hassought foreign-worker certification. As the Department explains, "The

sugar cane task-rate system has disappeared, and none of the sugar cane growers are using the

[foreign-worker certification] system."

The plaintiffs do not challenge the Department'sstatement, but they say their dispute over the

proper application of the foreign-workers regulation remains alive because there is a "reasonable

expectation" that the injury giving rise to their suit will recur. Honig v. Doe, 484 U.S. 305, 318-19

(1988). This is a prediction, and it could come to pass only if the sugar cane growers abandoned their

mechanized harvesting system, and only if they then reverted to the discontinued task-rate pay

system, and only if they sought Department certification of foreign workers. At oral argument,

counselfor the sugar cane growerssaid his clients have "no present plans" to do anything of the sort.

See Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan Invisible Empire, Inc. v. District of Columbia, 972 F.2d

365, 370 (D.C. Cir. 1992). The plaintiffs say, however, that the growers could be forced to return

to a manual harvest "if a weather emergency arises." Perhaps so, but that prospect is not enough.

While repetition of injury need not be "demonstrably probable" to save a case from being moot, the

expectation ofrepetition must be "reasonable." Honig, 484 U.S. at 318 n.6. We are aware of no case

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holding that the mere possibility of a freakish act of nature suffices. Even if a "weather emergency"

did force growers to seek foreign-worker certification, they still very likely would be bound by the

Department's determination that the per-ton systemwasthe prevailingand therefore requiredpay

system. In all likelihood, then, the growers could not return to the disputed task-rate system even

if they wished to do so. The plaintiffs' claims for prospective relief are therefore moot, and the

district court erred in not dismissing them as such. See North Carolina v. Rice, 404 U.S. 244, 246

(1971).

Adifferent jurisdictionaldefect plaguesthe plaintiffs'bid for retrospective relief. The plaintiffs

asked the district court to force the Department to condition any future foreign-worker certifications

on the sugar cane growers' payment of back pay for past violations. To maintain that claimor any

otherthe plaintiffs must first establish that they have standing to raise it. At a minimum, that

requires the plaintiffs to show that they have suffered some "actual or threatened injury" that can be

"fairly traced" to the Department's past certifications and that is "likely to be redressed by a favorable

decision" in the case. See Valley Forge Christian College v. Americans United for Separation of

Church &State, Inc., 454 U.S. 464, 472 (1982). The plaintiffs' claim for retrospective relief fails the

last of those tests: their "injury" from prior certifications cannot be redressed by a decision in this

case. The Department has neither statutory nor regulatory authority to order the growers to provide

back pay. See 20 C.F.R. § 655.110. The Department could deny future labor certifications in hopes

of forcing growers to provide back pay, but Heckler v. Chaney, 470 U.S. 821 (1985), almost

certainly would prohibit the court from directing the Department to do so. Moreover, for reasons

we have just discussed, such "relief" would be quite unlikely to redress the plaintiffs' injury. The

sugar cane growers are not exactly lining up to seek foreign-worker certification. The imposition of

a back pay requirement would only diminish their desire to do so. Thus, even if back pay were made

a condition of future certification, it strikes us as highly unlikely that the plaintiffs would ever benefit.

Yes, it is hypothetically possible that a weather emergency could force the growers to seek

certification again, but that "remote possibility" is not enough to establish that the plaintiffs' claim for

retrospective relief would be redressed by a decision in this case. See Warth v. Seldin, 422 U.S. 490,

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505 (1975).

In the face of these problems, the plaintiffs hope to keep their retrospective-relief claim alive

by arguing that they are entitled to an order for restitution from the sugar cane growers themselves.

The plaintiffs did not make a claim for restitution from the growers before the district court. Indeed,

the plaintiffs did not make any claims against the growers; the district court rejected their attempt

to add the intervening sugar cane growers as defendants. The plaintiffs seek cover in Rule 54(c) of

the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which requires courts to "grant the relief to which the party ...

is entitled, even if the party has not demanded such relief in the party's pleadings." FED. R. CIV. P.

54(c). Whether this assists them in establishing standing is far from certain. Rule 54(c) "comes into

play only after the court determines it has jurisdiction.... [Only after] jurisdiction is established and

a claim is heard, [does] Rule 54(c) permit the court to consider relief not specifically pleaded."

Dellums v. U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Comm'n, 863 F.2d 968, 975 n.8 (D.C. Cir. 1988); see also Z

Channel Ltd. Partnership v. Home Box Office, Inc., 931 F.2d 1338, 1345 (9th Cir. 1991) (Kozinski,

J., dissenting), cert. denied, 502 U.S. 1033 (1992). In any event, Rule 54(c) applies only if the party

has sought some relief from the particular opposing party. See Dopp v. HTP Corp., 947 F.2d 506,

518 (1st Cir. 1991); Flannery v. Carroll, 676 F.2d 126, 131-32 (5th Cir. 1982). To rely on relief

plaintiffs never requested on a claim they never made would be to conclude that zero plus zero equals

more than zero.

* * *

For the foregoing reasons, we remand this case to the district court with directionsto dismiss.

The case is largely moot. What is not, the plaintiffs lack standing to maintain. And lest there be any

confusion, we wish to make it perfectly clear that curing the latter will not fix the former. That is,

even if the plaintiffs can come up with a way to file a claim for back pay directly against the growers,

that will not be enough to bring their claim against the Department back from the dead. What's moot

is moot, and the filing of a different claim against a different party cannot make it otherwise.

So Ordered.

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