Court Opinion

ID: 9489586
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 13:19:23.834385+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:53:36.454420
License: Public Domain

CUDAHY, Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
Judge Bauer, for the new majority, has done a skillful job of reviving and restating a substantial part of his dissent in the earlier appeal of this case, Alexander v. City of Chicago, 994 F.2d 333, 342 (7th Cir.1993). In Alexander, we (or rather a fractionally different panel) refused to approve a judgment on the pleadings for the City on an undeveloped record like the one that is now before us. In that phase of the case, I wrote for the old majority and Judge Bauer dissented. The case and the issue to be resolved have not changed in any respect, but the panel has changed. And this is decisive. As a result the law seems to have changed without so much as a nod of recognition by the new majority to the law of the case doctrine, which has been flagrantly violated here. This in itself is more than enough to compel rejection of the (new) majority opinion.
The majority says here that the collective bargaining agreement can be a complete defense to a Fair Labor Standards Act claim when the agreement supplies a dispositive definition of “work.”1 The majority opinion in Alexander specifically rejected this approach:
Although a fact finder might consider [a collective bargaining agreement] as one among many factors in determining whether the officers were completely relieved of duty, it certainly does not outright preclude the officers’ claim.
Id. at 339 n. 11. The present opinion is thus in total contradiction of Alexander, but comports closely with the analysis of Judge Bauer’s dissent in that earlier ease. In his Alexander dissent, Judge Bauer asserted:
Here, the City is bound by the collective bargaining agreement which requires that the Officers receive overtime rates when they work during their meal periods. The Officers do not allege that the City has breached the collective bargaining agreement and, absent such an allegation, I assume that the City fully complies with its terms. Consequently the City pays the Officers if they work during their meal periods and does not pay them if they do not work during their meal periods. FLSA requires no more.
Id. at 345. The adoption of this analysis by the present majority obviously disregards the law of the ease.
In order to deal at least cosmetically with this unseemly state of affairs, the majority opinion states that our previous opinion “was based on a less developed record than we have here” and concludes that “upon further review, we conclude that the collective bargaining agreement can and does outright preclude the plaintiffs’ claim.” Maj. Op. at 232. Assuming that the majority recognizes the “predominant benefit” test relied upon in Alexander, the conclusion that the collective bargaining agreement alone can outright preclude the plaintiffs’ claim must imply that the required factual inquiry has been conducted and all of the facts other than the collective bargaining agreement have been shown to be inconsequential. This suggestion defies reality. The undeveloped — in fact, fragmentary — record now before us is in all relevant respects no different than the undeveloped record that confronted the Alexander panel.2 The record has not changed; only the composition of the panel has changed. All sides agree that discovery in this case is not complete. It is for this reason that the City *234concedes that Judge Marovich’s summary judgment on the merits cannot be affirmed for the reasons on which he relied. If discovery is not over, this court can hardly conclude that the collective bargaining agreement provides dispositive facts. Alexander clearly held that the predominant benefit test could be applied only after the complete development of the relevant evidence.3
The majority’s “further review” of the unchanged collective bargaining agreement leads it to suggest (contrary to Alexander) that the agreement is such an important factor that it makes all others pale into insignificance. The majority supports this suggestion by citing Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railway Co. v. Muscoda Local No. 123, 321 U.S. 590, 603, 64 S.Ct. 698, 705-06, 88 L.Ed. 949 (1944), for the proposition that “employers and employees may make ‘reasonable provisions of contract [to guide] the computation of work hours where precisely accurate computation is difficult or impossible.’ ” Maj. Op. at 232.
The majority neglects to point out, however, Tennessee Coal’s admonition that:
The Fair Labor Standards Act was not designed to codify or perpetuate those customs and contracts which allow an employer to claim all of an employee’s time while compensating him for only part of it. Congress intended, instead, to achieve a uniform national policy of guaranteeing compensation for all work or employment engaged in by employees covered by the Act. Any custom or contract falling short of that basic policy, like an agreement to pay less than the minimum wage requirements, cannot be utilized to deprive employees of their statutory rights.
Id. at 602-03, 64 S.Ct. at 705. In short, the FLSA establishes statutory rights which may not be contracted away. As the Supreme Court has stated, “... eongressionally granted FLSA rights take precedence over conflicting provisions in a collectively bargained compensation agreement.” Barrentine v. Arkansas-Best Freight System, Inc., 450 U.S. 728, 740-41, 101 S.Ct. 1437, 1445, 67 L.Ed.2d 641 (1981). Thus, even if the collective bargaining agreement had explicitly defined the officers’ meal periods as non-eom-pensable, an FLSA action could be sustained if the meal periods were actually for the predominant benefit of the employer.
Here, of course, the collective bargaining agreement contains no such definition. In the district court, the City moved for summary judgment on the grounds that the collective bargaining agreement declared that the officers’ meal periods were not compen-sable work and therefore served as a complete defense to the lawsuit. Judge Maro-vich rejected this position, finding that the collective bargaining agreement “fails to include any agreement regarding the meal periods.” Dist. Ct. Op. at 11. This finding is obviously correct, and the majority has not suggested anything in the agreement that would put it in doubt. Rather, the majority rests its case on the fact that, “The agreement clearly states that an officer is entitled to overtime rates for hours worked in excess of eight hours per day.” Maj. Op. at 232. This virtual truism hardly addresses the question now before us — whether officers’ meals involve “work.” In fact, the collective bargaining agreement has nothing to say on the issue before us, as the Alexander panel held and as Judge Marovich has subsequently found.
The majority opinion would leave the determination of whether the officers’ meal periods constitute “work” to case-by-case grievance arbitration. In fact, the majority opinion seems to rest on nothing more substantial than the belief that such arbitration may be a better way to resolve the question than would litigation in federal court. However, there is no abstention doctrine that tells us to abstain in favor of an arbitrator. Nor is there any like doctrine of primary jurisdiction. In fact, the Supreme Court has held that a worker may pursue a remedy under the FLSA even after losing a grievance arbitration. Barrentine, 450 U.S. at 740, 101 S.Ct. at 1444 (“No exhaustion re*235quirement or other procedural barriers are set up, and no other forum for enforcement of statutory rights is referred to or created by the statute.”).
The issues that are before us have been successfully litigated by courts in a number of jurisdictions where grievance arbitration might have been an alternative means of resolving the issues. See, e.g., Lamon v. City of Shawnee, 972 F.2d 1145 (10th Cir.1992), cert. denied 507 U.S. 972, 113 S.Ct. 1414, 122 L.Ed.2d 785 (1993); Berry v. County of Sonoma, 30 F.3d 1174 (9th Cir.1994), cert. denied - U.S. -, 115 S.Ct. 1100, 130 L.Ed.2d 1067 (1995); Henson v. Pulaski County Sheriff Dept., 6 F.3d 531 (8th Cir.1993); Reich v. New York City Transit Authority, 45 F.3d 646 (2d Cir.1995); Renfro v. City of Emporia, 948 F.2d 1529 (10th Cir.1991), cert. denied 503 U.S. 915, 112 S.Ct. 1310, 117 L.Ed.2d 510 (1992); Wahl v. City of Wichita, 725 F.Supp. 1133 (D.Kan.1989). Wahl involved an agreement requiring that officers who worked in excess of 40 hours per week should receive overtime pay at the rate of one-and-one-half times their regular rate of pay. Wahl, 725 F.Supp. at 1136. Such provisions are presumably common in labor agreements throughout the country but do not resolve the compensability issue for FLSA purposes. The agreement did not resolve the issue in Wahl, and the City has cited no case where such a provision was conclusive on the question of compensability under the FLSA. See also, Berry, 30 F.3d at 1182 (collective bargaining agreement not dispositive); Reich, 45 F.3d at 647.
In analyzing a question similar to that presented in the case before us (whether firefighters must be compensated for time spent on call), the Supreme Court noted the fact-specific nature of such determinations and the role which the employment agreement should play in the analysis. The Court stated:
We have not attempted to, and we cannot, lay down a legal formula to resolve cases so varied in their facts as are the many situations in which employment involves waiting time. Whether in a concrete case such time falls within or without the Act is a question of fact to be resolved by appropriate findings of the trial court. This involves scrutiny and construction of the agreements between the particular parties, appraisal of their practical construction of the working agreement by conduct, consideration of the nature of the service, and its relation to the waiting time, and all of the surrounding circumstances.
Skidmore v. Swift & Co., 323 U.S. 134, 136-37, 65 S.Ct. 161, 163, 89 L.Ed. 124 (1944) (citations omitted). The fact that a collective bargaining agreement, rather than a simple employment contract, is involved here does not change this basic analysis. As the Court pointed out in Barrentine:
In contrast to the Labor Management Relations Act, which was designed to minimize industrial strife and to improve working conditions by encouraging employees to promote their interests collectively, the FLSA was designed to give specific minimum protections to individual workers....
Barrentine, 450 U.S. at 739, 101 S.Ct. at 1444 (emphasis in original).
Indeed, the assertion that merely by providing for overtime pay in its collective bargaining agreement an employer may insulate itself from FLSA scrutiny borders on the preposterous. Yet the majority’s opinion essentially boils down to just such an assertion.
The majority also suggests that grievance arbitration would be more efficient than litigation under the FLSA in this case. The suggestion is apparently that allowing 12,000 officers to bring individual grievances about meal periods would be more efficient than would a decision about those periods under the FLSA. There might be reasons to prefer tens of thousands of individual grievance procedures over one lawsuit; but “efficiency” is not one of those reasons.
Therefore, I respectfully dissent.

. Here, of course, the agreement supplies no definition of “work.”

. The court in Alexander held that a collective bargaining agreement could be considered as "one among many factors” under the predominant benefit test. Alexander, 990 F.2d at 340 n. 11 (emphasis added). Nothing has occurred to change this conclusion. As the answer to the *234petition for rehearing points out, the parties have created a marginally more complete record by finishing discovery pertaining to the Portal Act defense and to the collective bargaining agreement defense. But the record is still obviously insufficient to eliminate disputes of fact under the predominate benefit test.

. It is, of course, possible that summary judgment on the merits might be appropriate here after the completion of all discovery.