18th Annual Workplace Class Action Report - 2022 Edition

Annual Workplace Class Action Litigation Report: 2022 Edition 381 (vi) Maryland Amaya, et al. v. DGS Construction, LLC, 2021 Md. App. LEXIS 152 (Md. App. Feb. 24, 2021) . Plaintiffs, a group of carpenters, filed a class action alleging that Defendant failed to compensate its carpenters for travel time between worksites in violation of the Maryland Wage & Hour Law (“MWHL”). According to Plaintiffs, Defendant required them to arrive at a parking site in the morning and take a shuttle bus to their MGM casino worksite, at which point they clocked-in for the day. Plaintiffs then rode the same shuttle back to the parking lot after clocking out to complete their workday. Defendant filed a motion for summary judgment, which the trial court granted. In its order, the trial court reasoned that Plaintiffs did not perform “work” at the parking site, meaning that it could not constitute a “worksite” for purposes of the MWHL. Id. at *4. Plaintiffs appealed the trial court’s decision, and the Maryland Appellate Court affirmed. In their appeal, Plaintiffs contended that they were entitled to compensation because Maryland never explicitly adopted the Portal-to-Portal Act. This Act, which was incorporated by Congress to amend the FLSA, provides that travel time is compensable where that time involves, for example, “travel as part of the employee’s principal activity, such as travel from job site to job site during the workday . . .” Id. at *21-22. The Appellate Court held that the MWHL essentially served as the state law equivalent of the FLSA, especially given that the MWHL’s definition of “employ” was identical to that of the FLSA. The Appellate Court therefore agreed with the trial court that Maryland need not have explicitly adopted the Portal-to-Portal Act because Maryland’s General Assembly presumably intended to have the state’s wage & hour regulations incorporate the FLSA. To that end, the Appellate Court also noted that the Portal-to-Portal Act had been in existence for decades prior to the passage of the MWHL, and that the Maryland General Assembly was aware of this FLSA amendment when it enacted the MWHL. Plaintiffs alternatively argued that the scope of compensable work had been expanded by Maryland case law, but the Appellate Court noted that this expansion was consistently limited to only governmental employees. With respect to the specific facts of this case, the Appellate Court highlighted the trial court’s findings that Plaintiffs performed no actual work until they arrived at the MGM worksite. In light of this fact, the Appellate Court concluded that carpentry at the MGM site was Plaintiffs’ “principal activity,” such that Defendant was not required to compensate Plaintiffs for their travel time under the Portal-to-Portal Act. Therefore, the Appellate Court affirmed the trial court’s order granting summary judgment in Defendant’s favor. (vii) Massachusetts Donahue, et al. v. Trial Court Of The Commonwealth Of Massachusetts, 2021 Mass. App. LEXIS 16 (Mass. App. Feb. 5, 2021). Plaintiff brought a putative class action on behalf of himself and other similarly- situated court officers alleging wage & hour violations pursuant to the Fair Labor Standards Act, (“FLSA”), the Massachusetts Wage Act, the Massachusetts overtime statute, as well as claims pursuant to common law. Under their collective bargaining agreement (“CBA”), court officers were not directly paid for the first 75 hours of accrued overtime, but instead received compensatory time off in lieu of pay for overtime worked. As such, Plaintiff alleged that Defendant failed to pay more than $10 million in wages and overtime compensation owed to him and other court officers. Defendant moved to dismiss the complaint as barred by sovereign immunity and for failure to state a claim, and the trial court granted the motion by dismissing Plaintiff’s complaint in its entirety. On Plaintiff’s appeal, the Massachusetts Court of Appeals affirmed the trial court’s judgment. The Wage Act is a statute that expressly applies to the Commonwealth and its instrumentalities, but only in certain limited circumstances. Plaintiff claimed that as a court officer, he was a mechanic, workman, or laborer under the law, or alternatively that his work took place in a penal institution such that the Wage Act applied to him. First, the Court of Appeals held that the trial court properly dismissed Plaintiff’s Wage Act claim as barred by sovereign immunity because Plaintiff was not a mechanic, workman, or laborer under Massachusetts law. Further, the Court of Appeals held that Plaintiff was not employed in a “penal institution” because the ordinary and common sense meaning of “penal institution” referred to State prisons and houses of correction and court houses were not penal institution. Id. at *10. Further, the Court of Appeals ruled that the trial court properly dismissed Plaintiff’s claim of overtime violations under the Massachusetts overtime statute. The Court of Appeals agreed with the trial court that the claims were barred by sovereign immunity because the statute governing the Commonwealth’s obligation to pay overtime did not provide a private right of action. Finally, as to the dismissal of Plaintiff’s common law claims, the Court of Appeals determined that at common law, an employee’s right to seek recovery of alleged unpaid wages sounded in contract or quasi-contract, yet Plaintiff made no reference to the CBA in his complaint and failed to assert a breach of contract claim. As such, the Court of Appeals held that