Lyes v. City of Riviera Beach, Fla.

• Decision Date: 11 February 1999
• Docket Number: No. 96-4577,96-4577
• Parties: 79 Fair Empl.Prac.Cas. (BNA) 330, 74 Empl. Prac. Dec. P 45,728, 75 Empl. Prac. Dec. P 45,728 Shari L. LYES, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. CITY OF RIVIERA BEACH, FLORIDA, Cinthia Becton, et al., Defendants-Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Eleventh Circuit

Page 1332

166 F.3d 1332

79 Fair Empl.Prac.Cas. (BNA) 330,

74 Empl. Prac. Dec. P 45,728,

75 Empl. Prac. Dec. P 45,728

Shari L. LYES, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. CITY OF RIVIERA BEACH, FLORIDA, Cinthia Becton, et al Defendants-Appellees.

No. 96-4577.

United States Court of Appeals Eleventh Circuit.

Feb. 11, 1999.

Michael J. McHale, Daves, Whalen, McHale & Considine, West Palm Beach, FL, for Plaintiff-Appellant.

Richard Hunt McDuff, Johnson, Anselmo, Murdoch, Burke & George, P.A., Ft. Lauderdale, FL, for City of Riviera Beach Redevelopment Agency.

Glen J. Torcivia, West Palm Beach, FL, for City of Riviera Beach Agency and others.

Robin L. Rosenberg, West Palm Beach, FL, for Neil Crilly.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida.

Before TJOFLAT, ANDERSON, EDMONDSON, COX, BIRCH, DUBINA, BLACK, CARNES, HULL and MARCUS, Circuit Judges, and KRAVITCH, Senior Circuit Judge.

CARNES, Circuit Judge:

We granted the defendant's petition for rehearing en banc in this employment discrimination case to decide two issues. The first is whether women are a protected class for 42 U.S.C. § 1985(3) purposes, so that a sex-based conspiracy against women is actionable under that provision. We hold that they are and it is. We also hold that Congress has the constitutional authority to prohibit such conspiracies, at least where they involve state action.

The second issue concerns the test applicable for deciding whether the employees of two employers are to be aggregated for determining if the minimum number of employees exist for Title VII coverage. We hold that the "single employer" aggregation test adapted from cases involving the NLRB, in which the employers are always private entities, is not applicable to those Title VII cases in which the employers are state and local government entities. For those cases we adopt a different test, one which presumes public entities that are separate under state law will not be aggregated for Title VII purposes. The plaintiff may rebut that presumption, however, by showing either: 1) that the state's purpose for separating the entities under state law was to evade Title VII, or 2) that the entities are so closely related with respect to the fundamental aspects of employment relationships that the presumption in favor of the state law's denomination is clearly outweighed.

Applying that test to the public entity that employed the plaintiff in this case, we find there is not enough evidence of interrelatedness to allow a reasonable fact finder to conclude that the presumption in favor of the state's denomination of the entity as separate and distinct from any other state or local body is clearly outweighed.

I. FACTS AND BACKGROUND

Because the factual and legal background of this case is more fully set forth in the panel opinion, Lyes v. City of Riviera Beach, Florida, 126 F.3d 1380 (11th Cir.1997), vacated and reh'g en banc granted, 136 F.3d 1295 (1998), we outline it only briefly here. The plaintiff, Shari Lyes, was hired by the City of Riviera Beach Community Redevelopment Agency (the "CRA") in 1989. Four years later, the position of Executive Director of the CRA became vacant. The CRA Board of Commissioners awarded the position to Neil Crilly, a male employee. When Lyes asked why she was not offered the position, she allegedly was told by a Board member that she was not qualified because of her sex. Lyes sued the City, the CRA, the members of the City Council, and Crilly, alleging that they had discriminated against her on the basis of her sex in violation of 42 U.S.C. § 1983, 42 U.S.C. § 1985(3), Title VII, and Florida law.

The district court granted summary judgment for the defendants on all of the federal claims, and dismissed the state law claims without prejudice under 28 U.S.C. § 1367(c)(3). The judgment against Lyes on the federal claims was based on the district court's conclusions that: (1) Lyes' 42 U.S.C. § 1983 claims were foreclosed by our decision in McKinney v. Pate, 20 F.3d 1550 (11th Cir.1994); (2) women are not a protected class under 42 U.S.C. § 1985(3), therefore, sex-based conspiracy claims are not actionable under that provision; and (3) the CRA did not employ fifteen or more people itself as is required for Title VII coverage, and under the NLRA's single employer aggregation test the CRA and the City should not be aggregated. Lyes appealed the district court's grant of summary judgment, and the panel reversed.

The panel held that Lyes' § 1983 claims were based at least in part on the Equal Protection Clause, not solely on the Due Process Clause as the district court had thought. Accordingly, the panel remanded the § 1983 claims for reconsideration in light of equal protection principles. See Lyes, 126 F.3d at 1387-89. We adhere to the panel's reasoning and result on the § 1983 claim, and reinstate that portion of the panel opinion.

With regard to Lyes' § 1985(3) claim, the panel held that women are a protected class under that provision, so that sex-based conspiracies against them are actionable under it. See id. at 1389-91. We address that issue in Part II of this opinion.

As to the Title VII claim, the panel agreed with the district court that the single employer aggregation test developed in the NLRB context should be used to determine whether the CRA and the City are a single employer for Title VII jurisdictional purposes. See id. at 1385-86. However, the panel disagreed with the district court on the result of applying that test to the facts of this case and concluded there was a genuine issue of material fact as to whether the CRA and the City are a single employer. See id. at 1386. We discuss those issues in Part III of this opinion.

II. WHETHER WOMEN ARE A PROTECTED CLASS UNDER 42 U.S.C. § 1985(3) , SO THAT SEX-BASED CONSPIRACIES AGAINST THEM ARE ACTIONABLE UNDER THAT PROVISION

Lyes claims that the defendants' actions constituted a conspiracy to deprive her of equal protection of the laws in violation of 42 U.S.C. § 1985(3). The district court granted summary judgment in favor of the defendants on that claim, because it believed that § 1985(3) prohibits only those conspiracies motivated by racial animus and does not extend to those motivated by sex-based animus against women. We disagree, at least where, as in this case, the conspirators are acting under color of state law.

We begin our discussion by addressing the question of whether women are a "class of persons" within the meaning of § 1985(3). Because we conclude that they are, we then address the issue, raised in a dissenting opinion, about the source of Congress' authority to protect women from sex-based conspiracies against them by persons acting under color of state law.

With regard to the scope of § 1985(3), the language of the statutory provision is clear and broad. It unequivocally states that:

If two or more persons in any State or Territory conspire, or go in disguise on the highway or on the premises of another, for the purpose of depriving, either directly or indirectly, any person or class of persons of the equal protection of the laws, or of equal privileges and immunities under the laws..., the party so injured or deprived may have an action for the recovery of damages, occasioned by such injury or deprivation, against any one or more of the conspirators.

42 U.S.C. § 1985(3) (emphasis added). The question, then, is whether women are "any class of persons" within the meaning of the statute.

Lyes argues that the textual similarity between the statute and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, coupled with the fact that the statute was passed just three years after the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, indicates Congress intended the scope of the statute to be coextensive with that of the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits sex-based classifications unless they "serve important governmental objectives and [are] substantially related to achievement of those objectives." Craig v. Boren, 429 U.S. 190, 197, 97 S.Ct. 451, 457, 50 L.Ed.2d 397 (1976). We need not determine the outer limits of § 1985(3) coverage, nor the precise relationship between the statute and the Equal Protection Clause, in order to decide this case. For present purposes, all we need to decide is whether § 1985(3) protects women as a class of persons from sex-based conspiracies against them where the conspirators were acting under color of state law. We conclude that it does, for the following reasons.

"In construing a statute we must begin, and often should end as well, with the language of the statute itself." United States v. Steele, 147 F.3d 1316, 1318 (11th Cir.1998) (en banc)(internal quotation and citation omitted). Here, the text of the statute indicates that women are a protected class within its domain, because the statute's prohibition of conspiracies against "any person or class of persons" certainly is broad enough to encompass women, and no other language in the statute excludes them from its coverage. As we noted in Merritt v. Dillard, 120 F.3d 1181, 1186 (11th Cir.1997), "the adjective 'any' is not ambiguous; it has a well-established meaning." Quoting the Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Gonzales, 520 U.S. 1, 117 S.Ct. 1032, 1035, 137 L.Ed.2d 132 (1997), we said in Merritt that "the word 'any' has an expansive meaning, that is, 'one or some indiscriminately of whatever kind.' " Merritt, 120 F.3d at 1186. In this case, as in Gonzales and Merritt, "Congress did not add any language limiting the breadth of that word, so 'any' means all." Id. at 1186 (quoting Gonzales )(internal citation omitted). Thus, women are within the plain meaning of "any ... class of persons," which describes the statutory scope of coverage.

Our enthusiasm for applying the plain meaning canon to § 1985(3) is tempered, however, by the Supreme Court's decisions in Griffin v. Breckenridge, 403 U.S. 88, 91 S.Ct. 1790, 29 L.Ed.2d 338 (1971), and United...