18th Annual Workplace Class Action Report - 2022 Edition

504 Annual Workplace Class Action Litigation Report: 2022 Edition Bishop, et al. v. Air Line Pilots Association, 2021 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 1075 (N.D. Ill. Jan. 5, 2021). Plaintiffs, a group of pilot instructors for United Airlines, filed a class action alleging that Defendant breached its duty of fair representation under the Railway Labor Act (“RLA”) when it retroactively issued back pay in a manner that favored line pilots over Plaintiffs. Id. at *1-2. For purposes of this litigation, the parties executed three relevant collective bargaining agreements (“CBAs”): the first in 2003, a second after United merged with Continental Airlines in 2010, and a third in 2012. Pilots from United sought retroactive pay after the United-Continental merger, and in 2012, an arbitrator allocated $225 million to be dispersed as back pay to the pre-merger United pilots. Id. at *4. Defendant then apportioned these funds by using the 2003 CBA’s pay cap and general compensation terms as its foundation, with the exception of incorporating the 2010 CBA’s higher hourly wage rates. Under this model, Plaintiffs received $4 million in back pay instead of the $10.25 million they would have received under Plaintiffs’ proposed model, which used the 2010 CBA’s non-hourly rate pay provision. Id. at *15- 16. Plaintiffs filed suit claiming that Defendant breached its duty of fair representation "‘by discriminating against…Plaintiffs and arbitrarily choosing to disregard their interests in favor of the interests of the stronger, more politically favored majority . . . in its misallocation of the retro pay.’” Id. at *14. Defendant filed a motion for summary judgment, which the Court granted. The Court found Plaintiffs’ claim regarding receiving 15% of their back pay while line pilots received 38% to be misguided. It reasoned that Plaintiffs’ only evidence of this claim was the testimony of one pilot instructor who actually derived his figures using the 2012 CBA rather than the 2010 agreement. The Court also noted that the 2012 CBA had since been renegotiated, and under its new terms, “pilot instructors are now making ‘much, much more money’ than they ever have.” Id. at *40. With respect to Plaintiffs’ claims of intra-union discrimination, the Court observed that, under Seventh Circuit case law, “ union’s actions are [deemed to be] discriminatory or in bad faith when it acts ‘ solely for the benefit of a stronger, more politically favored group over a minority group.’” Id. at *43. Here, the Court opined that Plaintiffs failed to offer sufficient evidence of Defendant’s alleged discriminatory behavior under the sole motive standard. In fact, the Court also identified a good faith, non-discriminatory justification for Defendant utilizing the 2003 CBA as its foundation: “the desire for a simple, facially neutral rule that would be understood as equitable by Defendant’s entire membership.” Id. at *46. The Court further held that the 2003 CBA’s terms even disadvantaged line pilots in certain aspects, such as by limiting the increases in minimum hours they would have received under the 2012 CBA. Accordingly, the Court granted Defendant’s motion for summary judgment. Dent, et al. v. National Football League , 2021 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 31568 (N.D. Cal. Feb. 19, 2021). Plaintiffs, a group of former professional football players, brought a putative class action alleging that Defendant, the National Football League (“NFL”), improperly administered pain medications that caused them injuries. Plaintiffs alleged that since 1969 doctors and trainers from the individual NFL franchises supplied Plaintiffs with a consistent string of pain medications in an effort to return Plaintiffs to the game, rather than allow them to rest and heal properly from serious, football-related injuries. Plaintiffs alleged that the medications were often administered without a prescription and with little regard for Plaintiffs medical history or potentially-fatal interactions with other medications, and were distributed in ways that violated federal laws (both criminal and civil) as well as the American Medical Association’s Code of Ethics. After Plaintiffs filed a third amended complaint, Defendant moved to dismiss. The Court denied the motion. In the third amended complaint, Plaintiffs alleged that they were given drugs during their NFL career and that the injuries that they suffered on the field were allegedly "caused, aggravated, extended, worsened, prolonged, exacerbated, intensified, perpetuated, protracted, or made permanent by the wrongful administration of medications . . ." Id . at *18. Defendant argued that Plaintiffs’ sole negligence claim was preempted because their voluntary undertaking theory was previously ruled on in the Court’s 2014 order, in which the Court determined that Plaintiffs’ claim was substantially dependent on and would require interpretation of many of the collective bargaining agreement’ (“CBAs’”) health and safety provisions to determine whether it acted negligently. Id . at *18-19. The Court found that while some of the injuries asserted by Plaintiffs were issues that the CBAs covered, there were other injuries, such as the harmful and long-term side effects from over-administration of prescription medications, which were not implicated by the CBAs. The Court also reasoned that it would need to examine whether Plaintiffs’ proof and theory would be that the undertaking itself was negligently carried out, as opposed to whether Defendant failed to intervene and stop the clubs’ alleged abuses of controlled substances after it received information of the alleged behavior. For these reasons, the Court held that dismissal of the third amended complaint was not appropriate, and it denied Defendant’s motion.