Source: http://bryanschwartzlaw.blogspot.com/2016/03/
Timestamp: 2019-04-19 04:19:49+00:00

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Public-sector unions will live to fight another day after the U.S. Supreme Court issued a 4-4 split decision in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association on Tuesday. The ruling—which comprised of a single sentence and has no precedential value outside the Ninth Circuit—is most notable for what it did not do: that is, provide a means to gut unions for both public- and private-sector employees nationwide.
Friedrichs challenged a long-standing rule, first applied to public-sector unions in the 1977 Supreme Court case Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, 431 U.S. 209, 235-36. In Abood, the Court determined that public sector unions could require non-members to pay an agency fee (also known as a “fair share fee”) to support the union’s collective-bargaining and-grievance adjustment activities from which all employees would benefit regardless of their union membership. Id. at 225-31. The Court distinguished these expenditures from a union’s political spending, for which a non-member could not be compelled to contribute to the union under the First Amendment. Id. at 232-36. The Abood decision in turn relied on earlier decisions by the high court which affirmed the right of private-sector unions to require all employees within a bargaining unit to contribute to non-political union expenditures. See Machinists v. Street, 367 U.S. 740 (1961); Railway Employees’ Department v. Hanson, 351 U.S. 225 (1956).
As a practical matter, a union’s ability to ensure that all employees pay their fair share of collective bargaining expenses is essential to its survival. A union bargains on behalf of all employees, regardless of whether those employees are members. Without the ability to require fair share fees, a union faces a collective action problem: why would an individual employee pay union dues when that employee can reap all of the benefits of the union’s collective bargaining efforts for free?
The necessity of fair share fees to the survival of unions has made them an enticing target for conservative efforts to attack unions and worker protections generally. The Roberts Court (or rather, its five most conservative members) signaled its eagerness to overturn the nearly forty-year old Abood precedent in its 2014 decision Harris v. Quinn, in which Justice Alito’s majority opinion criticized Abood extensively and declined to extend its holding to home health care workers paid by the state of Illinois. See Harris v. Quinn, 134 S.Ct. 2618 (2014). After Harris, the conservative advocacy group the Center for Individual Rights took the bait and brought the Friedrichs case with the goal of eliminating fair share fees from public-sector unions. Then, after the oral argument in Friedrichs this January, those same five justices from the Harris majority appeared primed to overrule Abood, notwithstanding the consequences for unions nationwide and the millions of workers they represent.
Thus, little doubt exists that were Justice Scalia still on the Court, Friedrichs would have crippled public-sector unions and provided a blueprint to apply the same reasoning to target private-sector unions as well. That decision would have paralyzed the collective bargaining rights of teachers, firefighters, healthcare workers, and countless other public employees in the 23 states that allow fair share fees.
Unions and workers had a good day on Tuesday, but the fight continues. The Center for Individual Rights has already announced its intent to file a petition for rehearing of Friedrichs in light of the split decision. The future of public-sector employee unions thus rests in the hands of the Supreme Court’s next member.
Today, the United States Supreme Court affirmed a basic principal underlying lawsuits challenging mass wage theft – if employers fail to keep records of employees’ work, then employees get to use their best estimate to prove their employer’s wage theft, including estimates based on statistical and representative evidence. The Court also confirmed that representative evidence may be used beyond the wage and hour context.
As we wrote here, the Court seemed unpersuaded at oral argument last fall that it should overrule seventy years of precedent, first established in Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery Co., that employees may use a “representative sample to fill an evidentiary gap created by the employer’s failure to keep adequate records.” Tyson Foods, Inc. v. Bouaphakeo, No. 14-1146, 2016 WL 1092414, at *9 (Mar. 22, 2016). Writing for a 6-2 majority, Justice Kennedy affirmed this long-standing and critical rule of law.
Importantly, the Court went beyond the lenient standard of proof established in Mt. Clemens, which is unique to the Fair Labor Standards Act context, and thereby confirmed that representative evidence can be used as common proof of classwide liability and damages in other legal contexts. In particular, the Court clarified that Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., v. Dukes, the infamous decision that struck down a nationwide gender discrimination class action and has been the cause of much consternation for worker and consumer advocates, “does not stand for the broad proposition that a representative sample is an impermissible means of establishing classwide liability.” Id. at *10. Instead, the Court correctly recognized that representative evidence, like any evidence, can be persuasive or unpersuasive to a jury depending “on the purpose for which the sample is being introduced and on the underlying cause of action.” Id. at *8. In cases where “each class member could have relied on that sample to establish liability if he or she had brought an individual action,” representative evidence is more appropriate in contrast to cases where affected individuals are not sufficiently “similarly situated.” Id. at *8, *11. Thus, any doubt about the propriety of representative evidence to prove classwide liability in the wake of Wal-Mart and Comcast Corp. v. Behrend has been dispelled. The new battleground appears to be not if, but when representative evidence can be deployed to establish an element of a cause of action on a classwide basis. Id. at *8.
Interestingly, the Court observed that the district court would have erred in denying class certification if its sole basis for denying class certification were the lower court’s perception of the expert report as unpersuasive. Id. at *11. Only if the lower court “concluded that no reasonable juror could have believed that the employees spent roughly equal time donning and doffing” would denying class certification have been proper. Id. See also Amgen Inc. v. Connecticut Ret. Plans & Trust Funds, 133 S. Ct. 1184, 1194-95 (2013) (“Rule 23 grants courts no license to engage in free-ranging merits inquiries at the certification stage.”) The takeaway appears to be that the Court will require aggrieved plaintiffs seeking to use representative evidence to first establish that they were “similarly situated” such that the defendant’s harmful conduct affected them “roughly” in the same way. Id. However, once this threshold is met, the representative evidence may be used to establish classwide liability if it is otherwise admissible – no “Trial by Formula” concerns in sight.
Also, as anticipated by comments at oral argument, the Court declined to consider the important question of whether the possibility of uninjured class members prevents a district court from certifying a class action because Defendants abandoned the issue. The district court will have to address this issue in the first instance on remand. If not addressed in this case, the issue of possibly uninjured class members likely will continue to be raised by employers seeking to avoid accountability for their wrongdoing by arguing that if they didn’t steal from each of its employees, then its victims cannot stand together because unaffected employees might possibly receive a windfall. Thus, the employer should be let off the hook, or so the defense bar’s argument goes. A patently ridiculous argument, but one that will be resolved another day.
Lastly, the Court cautions that any representative evidence that relies upon expert witnesses, sampling, and similar evidence remains subject to a Daubert challenge, and thus, must be methodologically sound. This is in line with California Supreme Court jurisprudence that a class action may be certified using representative evidence, but the methodology behind the representative evidence must be credible and free of defects such as sampling errors. See Duran v. U.S. Bank Nat. Assn., 59 Cal. 4th 1, 13, 50-8 (2014) (Liu, J., concurring). See also here and here for discussion of the holding in Duran, and issues relating to the use of representative proof to advance the cause of workers.
Thus, Tyson Foods, far from spelling the end of representative evidence in class actions, has breathed new life into class actions used to protect the interests of consumers, workers, and the general public.

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