Opinion ID: 3158527
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: vitality and reach of owens after bristol

Text: Bristol did not abrogate Owens. As a general matter, Bristol did not hold that the joint-employer and single-employer tests it relied on displaced all other principles relating to the analysis of employer status under federal employment-discrimination statutes. Rather, it noted that the applicability of the tests it applied was a function of the circumstances it confronted—involving multiple separate entities as alleged potential employers—and that different principles could properly govern in other circumstances. See Bristol, 312 F.3d at 1218 & n.5. More specifically, Bristol explicitly acknowledged Owens and distinguished, rather than disavowed, its agency-based holding. See Bristol, 312 F.3d at 1220-21. Bristol held that Owens’ agency analysis applies when the employee-numerosity requirement is implicated (i.e., when disregarding the agency relationship between Sheriff and County would leave the court without subject matter jurisdiction to remedy prohibited discrimination): Owens did conclude that a Kansas Sheriff was an agent of the County, but for the sole purpose of satisfying the fifteen-employee jurisdictional requirement of Title VII. No such jurisdictional question is at issue in the present case, because the Sheriff of Clear Creek had more than fifteen employees. Because we are presently faced with a case where the jurisdictional requirement is indisputably met, Owens is not implicated. Bristol, 312 F.3d at 1220-21 (citation omitted). Here, as in Owens, the federal employment-discrimination claims would, if asserted separately against the Sheriff’s 7 department, fail the jurisdictional numerosity requirement. To fall within the ADA or ADEA, an employer must have fifteen or twenty employees, respectively, “for each working day in each of 20 or more calendar weeks in the current or preceding calendar year.” 42 U.S.C § 12111(5)(A); 29 U.S.C. § 630(b).5 An interrogatory answer from Grant County indicates that the Sheriff’s department had no more than twelve employees in any given week during the relevant period. See Aplt. App. at 675-78. Of course, to hold that Owens’ agency principle remains available to attribute employer status to a County under the federal employment-discrimination statutes is not to hold that the principle necessarily applies under the circumstances of any particular case. We must still determine whether the Grant County Sheriff should be treated as an agent of Grant County. IV. SHERIFF AS AGENT OF GRANT COUNTY (SHERIFF’S OFFICE AS SUBORDINATE DEPARTMENT OF GRANT COUNTY) Under Oklahoma law, the County is a body politic and corporate, Okla. Const. Art. XVII, § 1, encompassing several offices including the office of an elected Sheriff, id. § 2; Okla. Stat. tit. 19, § 131(A), who acts on the County’s behalf by 5 We note there has been some question whether the numerosity requirement in the ADEA applies to government employers. When the ADEA was amended to clarify that it covered political subdivisions, the sentence added to § 630(b) to make that point did not refer back to the numerosity requirement. A number of circuits have now confirmed, based on legislative history showing a general intent to treat government and private employers the same, that the numerosity requirement applies to political subdivisions. See, e.g., Palmer v. Ark. Council on Econ. Educ., 154 F.3d 892, 896 (8th Cir. 1998); EEOC v. Monclova Twp., 920 F.2d 360, 363 (6th Cir. 1990); Kelly v. Wauconda Park Dist., 801 F.2d 269, 273 (7th Cir. 1986). We adopt that view here. 8 enforcing the state’s laws within its boundaries, see Okla. Stat. tit. 19, § 516(A). The same basic points under Kansas law were enough for this court to hold in Owens that the Sheriff was an agent of the County and the Sheriff’s staff were perforce County employees. See Owens, 636 F.2d at 286. In addition, the Oklahoma County Budget Act defines the Sheriff as a County officer, Okla. Stat. tit. 19, § 1404(8), and the Sheriff’s Office as a constituent department of the County, see id. tit. 19, § 1404(7), (11). The state Governmental Tort Claims Act (GTCA) likewise recognizes County officers and their staffs as County employees, id. tit. 51, §§ 152(7)(a)(1), (11)(c), who are thereby insulated from tort liability (borne instead by the County through respondeat superior) for acts within the scope of their employment, see id. tit. 51, § 152.1. Reflecting the above legal provisions in more concrete practical terms, the Grant County “Employee Personnel Policy Handbook” defines employees of the County “as those deputies and employees employed by or serving at the pleasure of the elected [county] officials,” Aplt. App. at 249, and directs County officials to instruct each new hire to “report to the County Clerk’s Office for enrollment as a county employee,” id. at 250. And Grant County does not dispute that it paid Ms. Cink’s wages, see Okla. Stat. tit. 19, § 153 (providing for County payment of salaries of county officers and their deputies and clerks), and enrolled her in its retirement plan, see id. tit. 19 § 957 (providing for County employee retirement plan for officers and employees). To be sure, Grant County points out that it is the Sheriff, and not the County Board, who oversees Sheriff’s staff and was responsible for the prohibited 9 conduct alleged here. But this was also true in Owens, where “[t]he district court concluded that the Sheriff should not be considered an agent of the county for purposes of hiring and firing Sheriff department employees because the Board of County Commissioners had little, if any, control over the Sheriff in such matters.” Owens, 636 F.2d at 286. We deemed the point immaterial to the County’s liability as employer under the federal employment-discrimination statutes: “[I]t is inappropriate to condition the County’s liability on whether the allegedly improper act was committed by the Board or the Sheriff when both are agents of the same political entity—the County.” Owens, 636 F.2d at 286. Grant County has not cited any authority, statutory or case law, that undercuts application of Owens’ agency principle here. We have, however, discovered a decision of the Oklahoma Court of Civil Appeals that appears facially inconsistent with such a result. In Bryson v. Oklahoma County ex rel. Oklahoma County Detention Center, 261 P.3d 627 (Okla. Civ. App. 2011), the County was sued, pursuant to the GTCA, under a respondeat superior theory for an alleged assault committed by a Sheriff’s deputy. The state trial court dismissed the claim on the basis that the deputy had not acted within the scope of his employment. After rejecting this rationale for dismissal, the court of appeals affirmed on the alternative basis that the deputy was not a County employee: “[I]t is apparent from the record that [the deputy] was employed by the Oklahoma County Sheriff’s Office. Therefore, . . . the County was not [the deputy’s] employer.” Id. at 632. But the unstated premise of the court of appeals’ truncated syllogism, i.e., that employment 10 in the County Sheriff’s Office precluded—rather than reflected—employment by the County, rested on little analysis and no precedent from the state supreme court (or additional authority from the court of appeals). And in any event, Bryson’s holding does nothing more than underscore the Sheriff’s direct supervisory responsibility for Sheriff’ staff, which may be significant for purposes of respondeat superior liability under state tort law but, as we have seen, is not the focus of our analysis of the County’s liability for purposes of the federal employment-discrimination statutes under Owens. The notion of “employer” in the federal statutes is not limited to employment per se, but also explicitly incorporates agency. Burlington Indus., Inc. v. Ellerth, 524 U.S. 742, 754 (1998) (referring to definition in Title VII6). Thus, “Congress has directed federal courts to interpret [these statutes] based on agency principles,” and for that we must “rely on the general common law of agency, rather than on the law of any particular State.” Id. at 754-55 (internal quotation marks omitted) (characterizing “[t]he resulting federal rule[s]” as “statutory interpretation pursuant to congressional direction”). The rule of Owens constitutes just such an agency principle and, per Ellerth, is not constrained by narrow state-law pronouncements regarding the scope of the strict employer-employee relationship. Consequently, the state court of appeals’ summary holding about the lack of such a relationship between the County and the Sheriff’s staff in Bryson, which involved a distinct state law 6 The definitions of employer in the ADEA and ADA also refer to agents. See 29 U.S.C. § 630(b); 42 U.S.C. § 12111(5)(A). 11 context and turned on considerations lacking material import here, does not cause us to question our resolution of this case under Owens.