Opinion ID: 171886
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: wage claim

Text: Less than two weeks before the scheduled date for trial, DCAA filed a Motion in Limine as [to] `Labor Claims', Aplt.App. Vol. III at 75, in response to a proposed pretrial order and a proposed instruction filed by Mr. Zokari. DCAA's motion sought to exclude from trial any evidence regarding the failure to pay [Mr. Zokari] for his last day of employment. Id. The motion was premised on the grounds that (1) Mr. Zokari had originally alleged that failure to pay his last day's wages was an act of retaliation, (2) the money had been paid, (3) the court had granted summary judgment against Mr. Zokari on the retaliation claim, and (4) Mr. Zokari had just raised for the first time (in the proposed pretrial order and proposed instruction) a `labor' claim based on the late payment. Id. at 75. The district court granted the motion, agreeing with DCAA that Mr. Zokari had not raised a wage-law claim until the eve of trial. On appeal Mr. Zokari complains that the district court's ruling in essence granted summary judgment against him on his wage-law claim (although his brief on appeal never cites a federal or state law under which he was bringing such a claim). The heart of his argument is that, contrary to what the district court said, he had consistently raised a wage-law claim in his original complaint and thereafter. We agree with Mr. Zokari that the court's grant of the motion in limine was not an evidentiary ruling but was a substantive ruling that he could not pursue a particular cause of action (a wage-law claim) at trial. Nevertheless, we affirm the district court. We begin our analysis by describing the relevant pleadings below. Mr. Zokari's original pro se complaint, filed on August 2, 2004, clearly describes itself as arising under Title VII. The caption of the complaint contains the following description of the cause of action: Discrimination in Violation of Title VII (RACE and NATIONAL ORIGIN). Id. at 79. The portion of the complaint headed Parties and Jurisdiction recites the parties and then states: 4. Plaintiff is an African-American employee bringing this action in response to his being discriminated against by the Agency on the basis of his race (African-American) and his national origin (Africa) both in violation of Title VII of the Human Rights act. 5. This action is brought for violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, discrimination on the basis of race and/or retaliation after he opposed illegal activities. Id. at 79-80. The remainder of that portion of the complaint recites the basis of venue and jurisdiction (citing to the general provisions of Title 28 and special provisions in Title 42 for discrimination claims) and alleges compliance with the notice and administrative-exhaustion requirements of Title VII. No wage law is cited. The heading for the final 12 paragraphs of the complaint (up to the prayer for relief) is Background Facts. Id. at 80. The paragraphs in that section recite complaints about his accent, the lack of training provided to him, examples of racial harassment, and adverse actions taken against him. One such adverse action is alleged in ¶ 20, which states in full: Plaintiff was not paid through the last day of his employment, which constitutes a violation of Department of Labor guidelines. Id. at 81. Mr. Zokari later retained counsel, who filed an amended complaint in July 2005. The amended complaint is virtually identical in all material respects to the original pro se complaint. The above description of the pro se complaint describes the amended complaint verbatim except that the caption contains no description of the cause of action. On November 20, 2006, DCAA filed its motion to dispose of the entire case through summary judgment. Reading the complaint as a whole as raising only Title VII claims, the motion makes no mention of any wage-law claim. The motion makes only two references to ¶ 20 of the amended complaint. Paragraph 15 of the statement of uncontroverted facts asserts that Mr. Zokari was paid through his final day of employment. And in the motion's Statement of the Case, after reciting that Mr. Zokari had alleged discrimination by (1) being provided less training than white employees, (2) being directed to take an English class, and (3) having his work reviewed more than other employees, it appends a footnote saying: Plaintiff further alleges that he was not paid for his time on the last day of his employment. Whether or not this is an act of discrimination, plaintiff has conceded that he has now been paid the approximately $100.00 he alleged he earned his last date of employment. This issue is moot. Aplt.App. Vol. I at 18 n. 5. More importantly, the response to the motion for summary judgment, filed by Mr. Zokari's attorney on January 25, 2007, makes no mention of a claim under any wage law. Its only reference to wages earned on Mr. Zokari's final day of employment is in the section entitled Plaintiffs [sic] Response to the Defendants [sic] Statement of Uncontroverted Facts. Id. Vol. II at 10. In response to DCAA's ¶ 15, he asserts that payment for his last day's wages was several months late. On March 16, 2007, the district court granted DCAA's motion as to the retaliation claim, set the discrimination claims for trial, and, not surprisingly, said nothing about any possible wage claim. Trial was scheduled for April 9. The pleadings that precipitated DCAA's motion in limine were filed shortly after the district court's summary-judgment ruling. On March 27, eleven days after that ruling, and less than two weeks before the scheduled trial date, Mr. Zokari submitted a proposed jury instruction entitled CLAIM FOR UNPAID WAGES. Id. Vol. III at 73. Referencing Oklahoma statute, title 40, § 165.3, the instruction told the jury that payment for an employee's final wages must be paid by the next regular payday and that late payment is subject to a penalty up to the amount of the unpaid wages. Two days later, in a proposed final pretrial report, Mr. Zokari recited as a legal issue for trial: Did the Defendant violate the Fair Labor Standards Act relative to work performed by the Plaintiff pursuant to 29 U.S.C.A. 216 and 40 O.S. 165.3? Zokari v. Gates, No. CIV-04-0940-M (W.D.Okla.) (Final Pretrial Report, March 29, 2007, at 3). The report also contained DCAA's objection to this issue on several grounds, including that it had not been pleaded. That same day, DCAA filed its motion in limine to exclude evidence regarding Mr. Zokari's claim that DCAA had failed to pay his final wages on time. The district court granted the motion, saying that Mr. Zokari's `labor claim' was raised for the first time in his pretrial filings and . . . [DCAA] was never on notice that [he] was asserting such a claim. Aplee. Supp.App. at 80. Mr. Zokari contends on appeal that he had raised his wage-law claim well before the district court's summary-judgment ruling. In particular, he points to ¶ 20 of his amended complaint, which alleged: Plaintiff was not paid through the last day of his employment, which constitutes a violation of Department of Labor guidelines. Aplt.App. Vol. III at 87. [1] In our view, the district court properly ruled that Mr. Zokari had not timely raised a wage-law claim. We recognize that most of our sister circuits have stated the general rule that a complaint need not set forth the plaintiff's legal theories. See 2 James Wm. Moore et al., Moore's Federal Practice § 8.04[3] n. 13 (3d ed.2008) (collecting cases); 5 Charles Alan Wright & Arthur R. Miller, Federal Practice and Procedure § 1215 n. 1 (3d ed.2004) (same). And one might say that ¶ 20 of Mr. Zokari's amended complaint adequately states the basis of a wage-law claim. But the complaint must `give the defendant fair notice of what the . . . claim is and the grounds upon which it rests,' Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544, 127 S.Ct. 1955, 1964, 167 L.Ed.2d 929 (2007) (quoting Conley v. Gibson, 355 U.S. 41, 47, 78 S.Ct. 99, 2 L.Ed.2d 80 (1957)). And Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 8(e) states that [p]leadings must be construed so as to do justice. We would not be doing justice if, in the present context, we were to construe Mr. Zokari's amended complaint as providing notice to DCAA of a wage-law claim. Aside from ¶ 20, every signal in the amended complaint informed DCAA that Mr. Zokari was not raising a wage claim under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) or some state law. The failure to cite a wage-law statute is only part of the story. The amended complaint affirmatively states that Mr. Zokari is an African-American employee bringing this action in response to his being discriminated against by the Agency on the basis of his race (African-American) and his national origin (Africa) both in violation of Title VII of the Human Rights Act and that [t]his action is brought for violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, discrimination on the basis of race and/or retaliation after he opposed illegal activities. Aplt. App. Vol. III at 85-86. The allegation that Mr. Zokari had not been paid all his wages is one of 12 paragraphs under the heading Background Facts. It appears within a series of paragraphs alleging acts showing that he had been subject to discrimination or retaliation. Paragraph 20 is preceded by a paragraph alleging that [i]t would appear that no African-American employees worked in this department during any of the past thirty (30) years, id. at 87, and is followed by a paragraph describing statements made at his EEOC hearing. One would naturally conclude that the purpose of alleging that nonpayment of his wages was contrary to Department of Labor guidelines, id. at 87, was to reinforce that there was no legitimate reason for nonpayment, thereby implying that the reason must have been discrimination or retaliation. A pleading should be read as a whole. And reading Mr. Zokari's amended complaint as a whole, it plainly asserts only claims under Title VII. In short, it would be a stretch to construe Mr. Zokari's amended complaint as putting DCAA on notice of a wage-law claim. To be sure, courts often, and properly, engage in such a stretch. But whether or not to do so should depend on the status of the litigation. A decision that do[ing] justice, Fed.R.Civ.P. 8(e), requires an expansive construction of a complaint will turn on the fairness to the parties and the burdens on the court that would result from giving a pleading a possible, but improbable, reading. Early in litigation, justice is usually served by expansively construing complaints. For example, if DCAA had initially responded to the complaint by moving to dismiss because Mr. Zokari had not properly exhausted administrative remedies, and if Mr. Zokari had replied that this ground for dismissal did not apply to his wage-law claim, then the district court would have been well-advised to construe the complaint as raising such a wage-law claim. After all, the court would likely grant leave to amend the complaint to allege a wage claim unambiguously. See Fed.R.Civ.P. 15(a)(2) (The court should freely give leave [to amend] when justice so requires.) Little purpose would be served by requiring a motion to amend. In other circumstances, however, reading a complaint so expansively could create injustice. This may be the thinking behind the statement by the Seventh Circuit that identif[ying] the wrong statute as the basis for [the plaintiffs'] claim was not important as long as [their] allegations gave notice of a legally sufficient claim . . . and they brought the legal support for their claim to the district court's attention in their response to the defendants' summary judgment motion. Ryan v. Ill. Dep't of Children & Family Servs., 185 F.3d 751, 764 (7th Cir.1999). A court, we can infer, should not stretch to read a complaint as asserting a claim not pursued by the plaintiff in response to a summary-judgment motion. The Second Circuit's opinion in Brock v. Superior Care, Inc., 840 F.2d 1054 (2d Cir.1988), is a particularly informative illustration of how the litigation context can inform how broadly a court should construe a complaint. The Second Circuit has consistently stated that complaints need not state legal theories. See, e.g., Newman v. Silver, 713 F.2d 14, 15 n. 1 (2d Cir.1983). In Brock, however, the court held that a complaint by the Secretary of Labor alleging failure to pay overtime stated a claim under § 17 of the Fair Labor Standards Act, 29 U.S.C. § 217, but not under § 16, 29 U.S.C. § 216, and therefore the district court had lacked authority to grant relief under § 16. See 840 F.2d at 1062-64. Section 17 authorizes suits by the Secretary for injunctive relief plus an order requiring the employer to pay unpaid wages. See id. at 1063. Section 16(c) permits further reliefnamely, recovery of liquidated damages in addition to back wages. See id. The complaint in Brock referred only to § 17, never to § 16; but the prayer for relief included liquidated damages, which were available only under § 16(c), and the district court had granted that relief. Under general principles one would think this an easy case and construe the complaint to raise a claim under § 16(c) as well as § 17. But an unusual feature of the case was that a defendant has no right to a jury trial for a claim under § 17 (which provides for only equitable relief), whereas there is a right to a jury in a suit for liquidated damages under § 16(c). See id. The Secretary argued that the defendant should have noted the prayer for liquidated damages and demanded a jury trial if it did not wish the district judge to rule on liquidated damages under § 16(c). The Second Circuit, however, held that the defendant could properly read the complaint as seeking only § 17 relief, and the Secretary should have sought to amend the complaint if he wanted liquidated damages. Id. at 1064. See Reich v. Tiller Helicopter Servs., Inc., 8 F.3d 1018, 1032-35 (5th Cir.1993) (following Brock ). But see Martin v. Deiriggi, 985 F.2d 129, 134-35 (4th Cir.1992) (distinguishing Brock ). The result in Brock can best be understood as an application of Fed.R.Civ.P. 8(e) ([p]leadings must be construed so as to do justice) to preserve the right to a jury trial. A party has only a limited time to demand a jury. See Fed.R.Civ.P. 38(b). A plaintiff should not be permitted to deprive a defendant of a jury trial by burying a legal claim (for which there is a right to a jury) in a complaint seeking equitable relief (for which there is no right to a jury) and then, when it is too late for the defendant to demand a jury, surfacing the legal claim. The plaintiff should be required, as Brock held, to amend the complaint to state the legal claim, thereby providing the defendant an opportunity to demand a jury on the claim, see id. This approach of applying Fed.R.Civ.P. 8(e) to construe pleadings in light of the stage of the district-court proceedings is implicit in our own case law. In this circuit when a plaintiff attempts to add a new theorya new cause of actionlate in the game, the issue has not been whether the legal theory should be read into the complaint, but whether an amendment to the complaint should be permitted. We have stated: Courts will properly deny a motion to amend when it appears that the plaintiff is using Rule 15 to make the complaint a moving target, Viernow v. Euripides Dev. Corp., 157 F.3d 785, 800 (10th Cir. 1998), to salvage a lost case by untimely suggestion of new theories of recovery, Hayes v. Whitman, 264 F.3d 1017, 1027 (10th Cir.2001), to present theories seriatim in an effort to avoid dismissal, Pallottino v. City of Rio Rancho, 31 F.3d 1023, 1027 (10th Cir.1994), or to knowingly delay[ ] raising [an] issue until the `eve of trial,' Walters v. Monarch Life Ins. Co., 57 F.3d 899, 903 (10th Cir.1995). Minter v. Prime Equip. Co., 451 F.3d 1196, 1206 (10th Cir.2006) (brackets in original). This statement would make no sense if, regardless of the course of litigation, we always construed complaints to raise any legal theory supported by the allegations of the complaint. If that were our rule, then a motion to amend would not have been necessarythe `new theories of recovery,' id., would be read into the unamended complaint. Of particular interest is Viernow, 157 F.3d at 799-800, in which we affirmed the denial of a motion to amend the complaint to add federal claims of violation of the Securities and Exchange Act to a complaint that alleged violations of the Texas Securities Act. And in Pallottino, 31 F.3d at 1025-27, we affirmed the denial of a motion to amend to add a claim under the Fourth Amendment to a complaint alleging a Fifth Amendment violation based on the same alleged facts. See Foman v. Davis, 371 U.S. 178, 181-82, 83 S.Ct. 227, 9 L.Ed.2d 222 (1962) (remanding for reconsideration of motion to amend to add quantum meruit claim to complaint alleging breach of agreement not to make a will, when amendment would present no new facts and do no more than state an alternative theory for recovery). Implicit in these decisions is that the original complaint needed to be amendedthat is, the new theory of recovery was not raised by the original complaint even though the predicate facts were alleged. The underlying principle is stated in Evans v. McDonald's Corp., 936 F.2d 1087 (10th Cir.1991), although without referencing Fed.R.Civ.P. 8(e). In Evans the plaintiff, in response to a motion for summary judgment, for the first time characterized her claim as a retaliatory failure to hire rather than, as before, a retaliatory discharge. We upheld the district court's refusal to address the new theory. We wrote: As a general rule, a plaintiff should not be prevented from pursuing a valid claim just because she did not set forth in the complaint a theory on which she could recover, provided always that a late shift in the thrust of the case will not prejudice the other party in maintaining his defense upon the merits. 5 C. Wright & A. Miller, Federal Practice & Procedure § 1219 at 194 (1990) [now § 1219 at 282-83 (2004)] . . . . We do not believe, however, that the liberalized pleading rules permit plaintiffs to wait until the last minute to ascertain and refine the theories on which they intend to build their case. This practice, if permitted, would waste the parties' resources, as well as judicial resources, on discovery aimed at ultimately unavailing legal theories and would unfairly surprise defendants, requiring the court to grant further time for discovery or continuances. 936 F.2d at 1090-91. Expressing that holding in terms of Rule 8(e), one would say that it would not have served justice at that stage of the proceedings to construe the plaintiff's complaint as encompassing a failure-to-hire claim. As a leading treatise states, It must be remembered that an undue amount of permissiveness toward the pleadings by the judicial system eventually may be reflected as an unwarranted increase in the burden on the other parties and the district judge. Wright & Miller, supra, § 1286 at 764-65. Here, Mr. Zokari did not present his wage-law claim to the district court in response to DCAA's motion for summary judgment. He waited until the eve of trial. In that context the district court properly refused to construe the amended complaint so broadly as to include a wage-law claim. See Evans, 936 F.2d at 1091. As our precedents suggest, Mr. Zokari simply acted too late to burden the court and the defendant with a new theory for relief. [2] We affirm the district court's grant of DCAA's motion in limine.