APSLEY v. The BOEING Co.
| Decision Date | 28 March 2011 |
| Docket Number | Case No. 05-1368-EFM |
| Parties | PERRY APSLEY, et al. Plaintiffs, v. THE BOEING COMPANY and SPIRIT AEROSYSTEMS, INC., Defendants. |
| Court | U.S. District Court — District of Kansas |
OPINION TEXT STARTS HERE
This case arises out of The Boeing Company's ("Boeing's") sale of the assets of its commercial facilities in Wichita, Kansas, and Tulsa and McAlester, Oklahoma (the "BCA Wichita Division"), to Spirit AeroSystems, Inc. ("Spirit"), in June 2005. Plaintiffs are former Boeing employees who were not hired by Spirit when it purchased Boeing's BCA Wichita Division assets. Plaintiffs brought this lawsuit alleging that Defendants, Boeing and Spirit, violated the Employment Retirement Income Security Act ("ERISA"), 29 U.S.C. § 1140; § 301 of the Labor Management Relations Act ("LMRA"), 29 U.S.C. § 185; and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act ("ADEA"), 29 U.S.C. § 623. The Court issued an Order (Doc. 356) granting Defendants summary judgment on Plaintiffs' ERISA claim, Plaintiffs' § 301 claim alleging that Boeing violated its CBA with the IAM when IAM members who did not receive job offers from Spirit were not allowed to vote on the proposed CBA between Spirit and the IAM, Plaintiffs' ADEA pattern or practice of intentional age discrimination collective action claim, and Plaintiffs' ADEA disparate impact individual and collective action claims. This matter is now before the Court on Plaintiffs' motion asking the Court to reconsider that Order (Doc. 359). For the reasons stated below, the Court denies Plaintiffs' motion.
The Court has discretion whether to grant a motion to reconsider.1 The Court may recognize any one of three grounds justifying reconsideration: an intervening change in controlling law, availability of new evidence, or the need to correct clear error or prevent manifest injustice.2 A motion to reconsider is not a second opportunity for the losing party to make its strongest case, to rehash arguments, or to dress up arguments that previously failed.3 Such motions are not appropriate if the movant only wants the Court to revisit issues already addressed or to hear new arguments or supporting facts that could have been presented originally.4
Here, Plaintiffs do not point to an intervening change in controlling law nor do they point to the availability of new evidence. Rather, Plaintiffs' motion is based entirely on the claim that the Court committed manifest error. Specifically, Plaintiffs argue that the Court erred in the following four ways: (1) not affording them more time to complete additional discovery; (2) failing to follow a decision it had made in an earlier order in this case; (3) not applying the pattern-or-practice framework to their ERISA and ADEA claims; and (4) misapplying the summary judgment standard. The Court will address these arguments in turn.
Citing to Fed. R. Civ. P. 56(d),5 Plaintiffs contend that the Court should have afforded them more time to perform additional discovery before granting Defendants' motions for summary judgment. In order to receive relief under Rule 56(d), the requesting party must "show[] by affidavit that, for specified reasons, it cannot present facts essential to justify its opposition."6 The Tenth Circuit has interpreted this rule to mean that the requesting party cannot "simply stat[e] that discovery is incomplete but must 'state with specificity how the additional material will rebut the summary judgment motion.' "7 In its initial Order, the Court denied Plaintiffs' request because Plaintiffs "merely stated what they intend[ed] to do with additional discovery; they [did] not state[] how any additional facts discovered during that time would create a genuine issue of material fact."8In their motion, Plaintiffs have again failed to specifically state how any additional material would have rebutted Defendants' motion. Therefore, the Court concludes that its earlier denial of Plaintiffs' Rule 56(d) request was not error.
Plaintiffs' next contention is that the Court failed to follow a decision it made in an earlier Order denying Defendants' motion to dismiss (Doc. 139). In particular, Plaintiffs claim that the Court's ruling in its Order granting Defendants' summary judgment motions is inconsistent with the following statement made in the earlier Order:
[w]here the net result of the agreed upon conduct was the termination of older workers for the purpose of interfering with attainment of rights protected by ERISA, both the seller and the buyers bear culpability for what amounts to discharging those individuals for reasons of age. Accordingly, Onex and/or Spirit may be held liable under ERISA section 510 if plaintiffs successfully prove they participated in the alleged scheme to get rid of the older workers.9
The Court disagrees. As is clear from the quote above, to succeed on their joint-action theory, Plaintiffs needed to show that the buyer and seller acted pursuant to an illegal scheme designed to prevent them from attaining additional rights protected by ERISA. Because ERISA protects only those rights that Plaintiffs were entitled to under the plan in which they actually participated,10Plaintiffs needed to present evidence that both Boeing's and Spirit's actions deprived them from accruing additional rights under the Boeing pension plan, the only plan in which they participated, in order for their theory to survive summary judgment. At the summary judgment stage, the uncontroverted evidence showed that Spirit's hiring decisions had no affect on Plaintiffs', or any other workers', ability to accrue additional rights under the Boeing plan. As explained by the Court in its summary judgment Order, it was this failure of proof that doomed Plaintiffs' joint-action theory. This result, the granting of summary judgment on Plaintiffs' joint-action theory because Plaintiffs had not shown that an illegal scheme existed, is completely consistent with the Court's earlier ruling. As a consequence, the Court finds no merit to Plaintiffs' second argument, and, thus, denies Plaintiffs' motion to the extent it is based on it.
The Court makes short shrift of Plaintiffs' third argument. In its motion, Plaintiffs argue that the Court's questioning of the appropriateness of applying the pattern-or-practice framework to ERISA claims and ADEA claims arising out of a single employment action, which is what Plaintiffs claim the divesture of the Wichita Division was, was error. While it is true that the Court questioned the application of this framework in the context of this case, it is also true that this fact had no affect on the Court's resolution of the matters before it, as it analyzed Plaintiffs' ERISA and ADEA claims under Plaintiffs' proposed framework. Accordingly, this argument does not provide a basis for the Court to vacate its summary judgment Order.
Plaintiffs' last argument is that the Court violated the Seventh Amendment by granting Defendants' summary judgment motion on their ADEA claims. The Seventh Amendment does not preclude the entry of all summary judgments, rather, just those that are improper.11 Therefore, the key question here is whether the Court misapplied the law governing summary judgment when deciding Defendants' motion.
Summary judgment is appropriate if the moving party demonstrates that "there is no genuine dispute as to any material fact" and that it is "entitled to judgment as a matter of law."12 "An issue of fact is 'genuine' if the evidence allows a reasonable jury to resolve the issue either way."13 A fact is "material" when "it is essential to the proper disposition of the claim."14 The court must view the evidence and all reasonable inferences in the light most favorable to the nonmoving party.15
Before delving into Plaintiffs' arguments, it is necessary to properly frame Plaintiffs' claims. As noted by the Court in its summary judgment Order, "Plaintiffs are not claiming that discrimination was the regular practice for a particular manager or even a particular director group, but rather that it was the standard operating procedure throughout the Wichita Division to discriminate based on age."16 With that in mind, the Court now turns to the question of whether it erred in concluding that Plaintiffs had failed to produce evidence sufficient to raise a genuine dispute of material fact with regard to its ADEA claims.
Plaintiffs first contend that the Court's conclusion was error because the Court failed to take into account all of their evidence. Implicit within Plaintiffs' argument is that the evidence that the Court did not explicitly discuss in its Order was probative of discrimination, otherwise there would be no basis for claiming that the Court erred in not considering it. The first piece of evidence that Plaintiffs allege the Court ignored is the email exchange between Onyx and its consultants while Onyx was in negotiations with the IAM over the contribution that Spirit would have to make to the IAM's pension fund. Contrary to Plaintiffs' assertion, the Court did address this evidence in its Order. In footnote sixty four, the Court stated that the exchange was not probative on the issue of whether age discrimination occurred during the divestiture because the parties to the emails did not select which workers to hire and the content of the emails were not shared with those inside of the corporate hierarchy at the Wichita Division.17 In their motion for reconsideration, Plaintiffs have not put forth any evidence that calls into question the Court's earlier conclusion relating to this evidence. Therefore, the Court concludes that it did not error in finding it not to be probative of discrimination.
The second piece of evidence is the portion of Jeff Turner's deposition testimony where he stated that older workers generally tend to be...
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