United States Court of Appeals 

For the First Circuit 

No. 15-1424 

ELIZABETH CARRASQUILLO-ORTIZ; CARMEN GUZMÁN-VÁZQUEZ; DANIEL 

OUVIÑA; VÍCTOR RIVERA; MATILDE RODRÍGUEZ-NOA; BRENDA ENID 

VÁZQUEZ-DÍAZ; FRED VOLTAGGIO-DE JESÚS, 

Plaintiffs, Appellants, 

v. 

AMERICAN AIRLINES, INC., 

Defendant, Appellee. 

APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT 

FOR THE DISTRICT OF PUERTO RICO 

[Hon. Gustavo A. Gelpí, Jr., U.S. District Judge] 

Before 

Thompson, Hawkins,* and Barron, 

Circuit Judges. 

Alfredo Fernández-Martínez, with whom Delgado & Fernández, 

LLC, was on brief, for appellants. 

Juan Enjamio, with whom Hunton & Williams LLP was on brief, 

for appellee. 

June 9, 2016 

 * Of the Ninth Circuit, sitting by designation. 
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BARRON, Circuit Judge. This appeal concerns the proper 

interpretation of Article 3 of Puerto Rico's Law No. 80 ("Law 80"). 

In January, we certified a question to the Supreme Court of Puerto 

Rico to aid in our resolution of the case. We now have the Supreme 

Court of Puerto Rico's response, and, on that basis, we affirm the 

District Court. 

To briefly recap, Article 3 requires companies that 

operate in Puerto Rico to pay a statutory severance, called a 

"mesada," to certain employees in Puerto Rico who are terminated 

as part of a downsizing or restructuring when less senior employees 

in their job category are permitted to remain. The plaintiffs are 

former employees of defendant American Airlines, Inc. 

("American"), who contend American owes them a mesada. 

The parties agree that American owed the plaintiffs a 

mesada only if American was required by Article 3 to compute 

seniority within the plaintiffs' job category based on "all the 

employees of the company, that is to say, taking into consideration 

all of its offices," P.R. Laws Ann. tit. 29, § 185c(b), rather 

than based on only employees in the same office as the employee 

who has been terminated. And the parties agree that this method 

of computing seniority applies only to companies "whose regular 

and usual practice is to transfer its employees from one unit to 

another." Id. Their key dispute is over whether American's 

transfers between its lone Puerto Rico office and its offices in 
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other jurisdictions count as relevant transfers for the purposes 

of Article 3. 

The District Court agreed with American that such 

transfers did not count, and it therefore granted American's motion 

for summary judgment. The District Court based this conclusion on 

the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico's decision in Reyes Sánchez v. 

Eaton Elec., 189 P.R. Dec. 586 (2013). There, the Supreme Court 

of Puerto Rico stated that the analysis of employer transfer 

activity under Article 3 of Law 80 "is limited to determining the 

frequency of transfers of employees between the company's 

establishments in the jurisdiction of Puerto Rico." Id. at 608 

(certified translation at 24). 

This appeal then followed, and, after hearing argument 

in November, we certified a question to the Supreme Court of Puerto 

Rico in January regarding Reyes Sánchez. In our opinion certifying 

the question, we noted that the statement in Reyes Sánchez on which 

the District Court relied, standing alone, supported American's 

position. Carrasquillo-Ortiz v. Am. Airlines, Inc., 812 F.3d 195, 

197 (1st Cir. 2016). But, we explained, the defendant company in 

Reyes Sánchez apparently1 operated only as a separate subsidiary 

in Puerto Rico and thus made no transfers between an office in 

Puerto Rico and an office outside of Puerto Rico that was part of 

 1 The plaintiffs have represented this to us throughout this 

litigation, and American has never contested that representation. 
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the same corporate entity. Id. at 197-98. American, by contrast, 

operates as one corporate entity worldwide and so makes transfers 

only within the same corporate entity. Id. We thus asked in our 

certification request whether the Reyes Sánchez Court's statement 

that the transfer analysis under Article 3 is limited to those 

"between the company's establishments in the jurisdiction of 

Puerto Rico," 189 P.R. Dec. at 608 (certified translation at 24) 

applied "where the employer has one office in Puerto Rico and 

multiple offices in other jurisdictions and operates all of its 

offices under the same corporate entity." Carrasquillo-Ortiz, 812 

F.3d at 200. 

In a resolution issued on May 6, 2016, the Supreme Court 

of Puerto Rico responded to our request by denying certification 

on the ground that Reyes Sánchez "held that the scope of [Article 

3] is limited to an analysis of personnel movements between an 

enterprise's establishments in Puerto Rico and those made out of 

the Commonwealth are not considered." Because this resolution 

makes clear that the holding of Reyes Sánchez covers cases in which 

the defendant employer operates as one corporate entity worldwide, 

and because American has only one office in Puerto Rico, American 

does not make transfers that could trigger the method for computing 

seniority that would benefit the plaintiffs. Accordingly, Reyes 

Sánchez requires that we affirm the District Court's grant of 

summary judgment to American.