Opinion ID: 806387
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: FMLA Eligibility

Text: Although the district court declined to engage the question of Donnelly’s FMLA eligibility, defendants seek affirmance primarily on the argument that Donnelly is ineligible for FMLA leave as a matter of law. Accordingly, we address that issue first.
To be eligible for FMLA leave, an employee must work “at least 1,250 hours of service . . . during the previous 12-month period.” 29 U.S.C. § 2611(2)(A)(ii). In “determining whether an employee meets the hours of service requirement specified [above], the legal standards established under [the Fair Labor Standards Act or “FLSA”] shall apply.” Id. § 2611(2)(C), citing 29 U.S.C. § 207. The relevant FLSA legal standards are explicated, inter alia, under the Portal-to-Portal Act of 1947, 29 U.S.C. § 254.
Department of Labor regulations interpreting the FMLA address the burden of proof regarding eligibility. The regulations require that [i]n the event an employer does not maintain an accurate record of hours worked by an employee, including for employees who are exempt from FLSA’s requirement that a record be kept of their hours worked . . . , the employer has the burden of showing that the employee has not worked the requisite hours. An employer must be able to clearly demonstrate, for example, that full-time teachers (see § 825.800 for definition) of an elementary or secondary 14 school system, or institution of higher education, or other educational establishment or institution (who often work outside the classroom or at their homes) did not work 1,250 hours during the previous 12 months in order to claim that the teachers are not eligible for FMLA leave. 29 C.F.R. § 825.110(c)(3). This provision, not cited by the District, plainly provides that the District must prove FMLA ineligibility. There is no indication in the record that the District maintained records of the working hours of teachers, and the regulation makes clear that an “employer [that] does not maintain an accurate record of hours worked by an employee . . . has the burden of showing that the employee has not worked the requisite hours.” Id. Moreover, the regulation expressly addresses the specific situation of teachers such as Donnelly, providing that an employer of “full-time teachers . . . of an elementary or secondary school system . . . who often work outside the classroom or at their homes” must show that such employees “did not work 1,250 hours during the previous 12 months in order to claim that the teachers are not eligible for FMLA leave.” Id. Thus, the burden of proof is squarely on the District to prove that Donnelly did not work 1,250 hours in the year preceding his leave.
To the extent that the District argues that the CBA between Donnelly’s union and the District was effectively determinative of the number of hours Donnelly worked, we cannot agree. Noting that Donnelly was present on 172 of the 189 days of the preceding 15 school year, the District multiplies that number by the 7.25 hour work day provided for by the CBA, and concludes that Donnelly worked only 1,247 hours. The calculation, however, cannot stop there. With respect to the initial computation of the 1,250 hours, the regulations provide that [t]he determining factor is the number of hours an employee has worked for the employer within the meaning of the FLSA. The determination is not limited by methods of recordkeeping, or by compensation agreements that do not accurately reflect all of the hours an employee has worked for or been in service to the employer. Any accurate accounting of actual hours worked under FLSA’s principles may be used. 29 C.F.R. § 825.110(c)(1). In light of this clear instruction, we cannot conclude that, when computing FMLA eligibility, we are restricted to the hours identified in a collective bargaining agreement. The regulations specifically reject the proposition that a compensation agreement, such as the CBA in this case – the sole compensation agreement between Donnelly and the District – can conclusively determine the computation of hours required for FMLA eligibility, unless it “accurately reflect[s] all of the hours an employee has worked for or been in service to the employer.” Id. The regulation is clear: “all of the hours an employee has worked” must be counted, regardless of the provisions of an employment agreement. Id. (emphasis added). Moreover, in calculating the number of hours worked, “[a]ny accurate accounting of actual hours worked under FLSA’s principles may be used.” Id. The number of hours worked is thus a factual question, on which the CBA – while certainly evidence to be considered – is not determinative. 16 Although not a case concerning a high school teacher, the Sixth Circuit’s decision in Staunch v. Cont’l Airlines Inc., 511 F.3d 625 (6th Cir. 2008) – which appears to be the only reported appellate opinion construing 29 CFR § 825.110(c)(1)5 – is helpful by analogy. Staunch, a flight attendant for Continental Airlines, alleged unlawful retaliation after she took maternity leave. Id. at 627. The district court granted summary judgment to Continental in part on the basis of Staunch’s failure to meet the 1,250 hours threshold outlined in 29 U.S.C. § 2611(2)(A). Id. at 628. Continental showed, through flight records and the CBA that accounted for covered non-flight work for before and after the flights, that Staunch worked only 1,128 hours. Id. at 630. In response, Staunch provided her own “undated list of tasks and hours she compiled based on her own recollection,” that suggested significantly longer hours. Id. The Sixth Circuit ultimately concluded that Staunch’s assertions were insufficient to present a genuine issue for trial. That conclusion, however, was not based simply on the terms of the CBA. Rather, the court noted that the evidence Staunch presented was unreliable principally because her “general allegations regarding the additional hours she worked prove[d] to be inflated and unsupported” by the evidence. This evidence included not only the hours that flight attendants were expected to work under the CBA, but also evidence that Staunch sought (1) to double-count time she spent checking in for the flights worked, and (2) to include additional time “for customs/immigration processing in 5 The Sixth Circuit also cited 29 C.F.R. § 825.110(c) briefly and without relevance to the present case in Mutchler v. Dunlap Mem’l Hosp., 485 F.3d 854, 857-58 (6th Cir. 2007). 17 . . . Mexico, [and the] Caribbean” when she had not made trips to either destination during the relevant period. Id. Thus, the defendant in Staunch carried its burden, but did so by more than a reference to the plaintiff’s CBA: Continental made a tailored, individualized showing based on preexisting records of hours worked that definitively established that the plaintiff could not meet the 1,250 hour threshold. We adopt a standard similar to that expressed by the Sixth Circuit. In cases where a plaintiff avers that a relevant compensation agreement – including, as in Staunch, a collective bargaining agreement – “do[es] not accurately reflect all of the hours an employee has worked for or been in service to the employer,” 29 CFR § 825.110(c)(1), “the employer has the burden of showing that the employee has not worked the requisite hours.” Id. § 825.110(c)(3). As in Staunch, the employer’s burden is not heavy, but it is specific. To succeed on a motion for summary judgment, a defendant must show that, in the plaintiff’s specific case, either the hours alleged could not have occurred or the hours alleged are not compensable as a matter of law “according to the principles established under the [FLSA].” Id. § 825.110(c)(1). See also Kosakow v. New Rochelle Radiology Assocs., P.C., 274 F.3d 706, 716-19 (2d Cir. 2001) (holding that the district court erred in granting defendants summary judgment where plaintiff averred coming to work fifteen minutes earlier than reported in her time sheets to accomplish office tasks that she and her coworkers testified were prerequisites to opening the office in time to receive patients). In this case, the CBA itself implicitly acknowledges that, on occasion, teachers will work outside of the seven hours and fifteen minutes anticipated by the CBA. It 18 provides that “[t]o the extent practicable, the time between the end of the pupil’s regular school day and the close of the working day shall be devoted to the said responsibilities.” The CBA thus clearly anticipates circumstances that will require a teacher’s time outside of the seven-hour and fifteen-minute workday, when it will not be “practicable” that the teacher’s responsibilities can be fulfilled in the hour after the students’ school day ends. The CBA is not alone in recognizing this reality. The FMLA regulations also expressly note the common understanding that “full-time teachers . . . of an elementary or secondary school system . . . often work outside the classroom or at their homes,” 29 C.F.R. § 825.110(c)(3), and that this reality informs the interpretation of FMLA eligibility. Donnelly, however, does not rely simply on generalizations about the work life of high school teachers. He avers that “most teachers” in the District “regularly work in excess” of the one hour beyond the students’ day provided for in the CBA, and that he himself “typically worked a total of 1.5 hours before and after class every day.” This claim, standing alone, would suffice to shift the burden to the District, but it is further corroborated by Chakar’s evaluation report, which acknowledged in writing that Donnelly regularly arrived at work early, and “often stays late into the afternoon working with his kids to ensure their success.” If Donnelly did indeed work an extra half hour per day beyond what the CBA required, over the 172 work days acknowledged by the District he worked far more than the three additional hours he needed to demonstrate FMLA eligibility. Moreover, since the discrepancy between the CBA calculation and the 19 eligibility threshold is only three hours, even a jury that believed that Donnelly’s claim of an extra half hour per day was vastly exaggerated could still rationally and indeed without difficulty find, informed by the common understanding embodied in the CBA and the regulations, that in the course of a year Donnelly worked at least three hours beyond what the CBA set as a maximum.
Despite its frequent invocation of the CBA, the District effectively concedes that the question is not whether the CBA provides the exclusive basis for FMLA eligibility. The District primarily argues that even if the alleged hours Donnelly worked beyond those required by the CBA were spent on tasks somehow related to teaching, Donnelly has not presented sufficient evidence to establish that the missing three hours he alleges to have worked were, as they must be, compensable under the principles of the FLSA. In making this argument, the District relies on portions of the FLSA enacted as part of the Portal-to-Portal Act of 1947, 29 U.S.C. § 254. Under the Act, whether hours worked “count” for purposes of the FLSA (and thus for FMLA eligibility) is determined by whether those hours are devoted to activities that constitute “an integral and indispensable part of the principal activity of the employment.” Steiner v. Mitchell, 350 U.S. 247, 256 (1956); see also Kosakow, 274 F.3d at 717-18. Those activities that are not integral and indispensable are not compensable under the FLSA. Gorman v. Consol. Edison Co., 488 F.3d 586, 591-95 (2d Cir. 2007). The Act amended the FLSA to clarify that employees need not be compensated for 20 activities which are preliminary to or postliminary to said principal activity or activities, which occur either prior to the time on any particular workday at which such employee commences, or subsequent to the time on any particular workday at which he ceases, such principal activity or activities. 29 U.S.C. § 254(a)(2). To be sure, the line separating activities that are integral and indispensable to the principal activity of employment, from those that are not so integral or indispensable, is not always clear. For example, employees at a battery plant who must suit up before work and shower after can count such activities as compensable, Steiner, 350 U.S. at 256, but employees at a nuclear power facility who change clothes when they arrive and depart the plant cannot, Gorman, 488 F.3d at 595. Moreover, the shadowy distinction has apparently never been clarified by case law specific to the context of teachers. The parties do not cite, and our research has not discovered, a single case applying the Portalto-Portal Act to hours worked by teachers. Nonetheless, whatever the exact line separating compensable from noncompensable work, it is clear that the three hours Donnelly alleges he worked must conform to the principles established by the Act. We need not, however, definitely resolve the precise limits of what sort of work teachers do at home or after hours that is integral to teaching, and which work is merely preliminary or postliminary to that principal activity. It is sufficiently clear, as is recognized in the CBA and the regulations, that the principal work activity of teachers must extend beyond the hours spent in front of a class, and will include such basic activities as preparing lesson plans, helping students 21 who have difficulty absorbing the class material, and preparing and grading tests and homework. The District’s argument does not turn on the precise location of the boundary between principal and preliminary activities; rather, the District argues that because Donnelly provided no details at all on what he did during the extra hours he claims to have worked, he cannot be held to have raised a genuine dispute as to a material fact about whether he worked three additional compensable hours beyond the CBA’s requirements. That argument is unavailing. It is certainly correct that Donnelly’s testimony is extremely thin and does not state the specific tasks he performed outside of the CBAsanctioned workday. This is not a case, however, in which an employee with a 9-to-5 job with defined office tasks claims to engage in mysterious unspecified additional activities off-site. The CBA acknowledges that job-required tasks that are part of a teacher’s primary work responsibility are regularly performed by teachers outside the hours in which the students are in the classroom. It may reasonably be inferred from Donnelly’s declaration that he claims simply that these same tasks sometimes take more time to complete than the one additional hour specified in the CBA. Moroever, the District ignores Chakar’s evaluation’s reference to Donnelly’s long hours. Besides corroborating Donnelly’s claim that he did something before and after the required hours, Chakar’s statement makes clear that he, as Donnelly’s supervisor and a representative of the District, regarded Donnelly’s long hours not as preliminary work distinct from the principal activity for which Donnelly was employed, but as work that the District 22 approved and encouraged as part of its educational mission. According to Chakar, Donnelly did not merely hang around the school until late in the day; rather “[h]e often stay[ed] late into the afternoon working with his kids to ensure their success.” “Working with the kids to ensure their success” is as good a definition of the “principal activity” of a secondary school teacher as we can imagine. The cases the District cites for the proposition that, to survive summary judgment, the Portal-to-Portal Act requires more of a showing than Donnelly offers are inapposite. For example, in Kuebel v. Black & Decker, Inc., 643 F.3d 352 (2d Cir. 2011), the plaintiff argued that his routine administrative tasks, done at home, rendered his commute time compensable work. We held that “[t]he general rule, however, is and always has been that the FLSA does not treat ordinary home-to-job-site travel as compensable,” id. at 360, and contrasted the plaintiff’s losing argument with the long-established conclusion that “periods during which an employee is completely relieved from duty and which are long enough to enable him to use the time effectively for his own purposes are not hours worked,” id., quoting 29 C.F.R. § 785.16(a) (alterations omitted). The District here argues that Kuebel controls this case, and that since “there is no evidence that [Donnelly] was not free to leave the school and use his time after class instruction was over, or at the conclusion of seven hours and fifteen minutes of a day, freely and as he wished,” as a matter of law, Donnelly cannot show that his work was compensable under the FLSA. Appellee’s Br. at 23. 23 That argument goes too far. Donnelly alleges that he worked, but did so – as both the CBA and the regulations recognize will sometimes occur – during hours when he was not required to be at school. A reasonable jury could conclude that even if a teacher is permitted to go home after seven and a quarter hours, he or she is still required to prepare proper lessons and formulate and grade examinations, and that the District will not accept as an excuse for inadequate lesson plans and ungraded student papers that the teacher did all he or she could in the time required under the CBA. The law does not preclude teachers who grade papers or plan their lessons at home from ever counting that time for purposes of FMLA eligibility. A jury reviewing the evidence in this record might well conclude that the evidence that Donnelly presents is insufficient to persuade it to find that he spent three or more hours beyond the CBA-maximum time engaged in activities integral to his employment. That factual inquiry is not ours to answer. The District has raised questions about the credibility and probative force of Donnelly’s evidence that he worked enough additional compensable hours to qualify for FMLA leave. But these questions are, on this record, to be answered by the jury, which can assess Donnelly’s and Chakar’s testimony and credibility and determine how much time, if any at all, Donnelly worked beyond that specified in the CBA, and whether such time was compensable under the principles of the FLSA. See Hayes v. N.Y.C. Dep’t of Corr., 84 F.3d 614, 619 (2d Cir. 1996) (holding that a district court “should not weigh evidence or assess the credibility of witnesses” in reviewing a motion for summary judgment). Summary judgment for the District may not, therefore, be justified on the ground of Donnelly’s ineligibility for FMLA leave. 24