Brown v. Ill. Bell Tel. Co.
| Decision Date | 19 January 2016 |
| Docket Number | Case No. 15 C 2709 |
| Court | U.S. District Court — Northern District of Illinois |
| Parties | JEROME BROWN, Plaintiff, v. ILLINOIS BELL TELEPHONE CO. d/b/a AT&T Illinois, Defendant. |
Jerome Brown has sued his former employer Illinois Bell Telephone Company alleging violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), the Illinois Minimum Wage Law (IMWL), and the Illinois Wage Payment and Collection Act (IWPCA). Brown alleges that Illinois Bell improperly required him to work before and after his shifts and through his lunch breaks without proper compensation. Illinois Bell has moved to dismiss Brown's FLSA and IMWL claims to the extent they are based on allegations that predate February 2011. Illinois Bell also moves to dismiss Brown's IWPCA claim on the ground that it is preempted by federal law. The Court dismisses the IWPCA claim but declines to dismiss any part of the FLSA claim.
Brown was a cable splicer at Illinois Bell and was paid on an hourly basis. Throughout his employment, he was typically scheduled to work eight-hour shifts. Illinois Bell did not require employees to punch a clock to keep track of their working hours. 2d Am. Compl. ¶ 24. Instead, the company required employees to report codes for each discrete task they completed. Id. ¶¶ 25-26. Illinois Bell assigned a predetermined amount of time to each discrete task. If an employee took longer than the assigned time to complete a task, his efficiency rating went down. Id. ¶¶ 27-28.
Brown alleges that the available task codes did not account for all activities he performed or hours he worked. For instance, he alleges that Illinois Bell regularly required him to perform a variety of tasks before his scheduled shift, including checking for supplies, reviewing blueprints and jobs, checking his email, and talking with his manager. Brown estimates that he performed pre-shift work roughly three to five days per week, depending on his work schedule, and that it took from twenty to thirty minutes each time. Because those tasks did not have task codes, they were unaccounted for, according to Brown. Id. ¶¶ 32-34.
Brown also alleges that Illinois Bell required its employees to report a thirty-minute lunch break, regardless of whether they actually took a lunch break or instead kept working during that time. Id. ¶ 35. He alleges that he regularly worked through lunch, completing a number of tasks that he contends were compensable, such as securing and traveling between job sites, repairing equipment, and meeting with customers. He alleges that he worked through lunch two to three times per week, depending on the number of shifts he worked in a particular week. Id. ¶¶ 36-37.
Finally, Brown alleges that he performed, and was required to perform, work after his shift ended for which he was not compensated. Specifically, he alleges that Illinois Bell required cable splicers to return to the company garage no more than twenty minutes before the end of the scheduled shift, irrespective of the amount of work thecable splicer needed to perform at the garage after returning. Id. ¶ 38. This included paperwork which, Brown alleges, he often had to perform after the end of his scheduled shift time because twenty minutes was not enough time to complete this work. Id. ¶ 39. Brown says that he had to perform about fifteen minutes of post-shift work three days each week. Id. ¶ 40.
Brown alleges that Illinois Bell knew that he performed uncompensated work. He says that his former supervisors observed him performing work before and after his shift. He further alleges that his supervisors encouraged the uncompensated work, pressuring him to complete reportable discrete tasks without recording his time to ensure that he met Illinois Bell's efficiency expectations. Id. ¶¶ 41-43, 45-53.
On January 17, 2011, a number of employees at Illinois Bell—not including Brown—filed a suit against the company alleging violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). See Blakes v. Ill. Bell Tel. Co., No. 11 C 336 (N.D. Ill.). The case was originally assigned to now-retired Judge Blanche Manning. It was later reassigned to Magistrate Judge Young Kim with the parties' consent.
The FLSA permits similarly situated employees to bring claims through a collective action via an opt-in process. See Alvarez v. City of Chicago, 605 F.3d 445, 448 (7th Cir. 2010). Judge Kim conditionally certified a collective action on June 15, 2011 and allowed discovery to begin. Judge Kim's conditional certification included claims relating to working through lunch breaks and post-shift work.
Brown opted into the Blakes case on August 31, 2011. The amended complaint in that case, which was the operative version of the plaintiffs' complaint when Brown opted in, contained a general allegation that Illinois Bell violated the FLSA bysystematically failing to pay its cable splicers for all of the time they worked, including overtime. In their more particularized allegations, the plaintiffs alleged that Illinois Bell required its employees to complete unpaid work during lunch and after their shifts ended, but they did not confine their claim to these contentions. See Blakes v. Ill. Bell Tel. Co., No. 11 C 336, dkt. no. 11 ¶ 33 ().
On December 17, 2013, Judge Kim partially decertified the Blakes collective action, allowing only claims regarding uncompensated post-shift work to move forward collectively. He determined that aside from this, the plaintiffs' varied factual allegations did not satisfy the commonality requirement for collective action suits. The plaintiffs moved for Judge Kim to toll the statute of limitations to allow individual plaintiffs time to determine whether to pursue their non-collective claims individually. The motion noted, correctly, that Judge Kim's order had not ruled on the merits of any claims but rather had concluded only that the decertified claims could not proceed collectively. Judge Kim granted the plaintiffs' motion, staying the decertification order until February 28, 2014.
On February 28, 2014, Brown and several other opt-in plaintiffs from Blakes joined to file Tinoco v. Illinois Bell Telephone Co., No. 14 C 1456 (N.D. Ill.). In Tinoco, the plaintiffs asserted an FLSA claim based on the lunch break allegations originally made in Blake and allegations that Illinois Bell required them to work before and after their scheduled shifts. On March 24, 2015, Chief Judge Ruben Castillo ruled that the plaintiffs' claims were not properly joined in a single suit and therefore severed the claims of all of the plaintiffs except the first-named plaintiff in the second amendedcomplaint. Judge Castillo ordered that each of the severed plaintiffs would be assigned a separate docket number. He stated that if a severed plaintiff wanted to proceed with his claims, he would have to file a separate amended complaint containing only his own claims. Judge Castillo did not, however, dismiss any claims made by any plaintiff. On July 30, 2015, Brown filed the complaint in this case.
When considering a motion to dismiss under Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(b)(6), the Court accepts the facts in the complaint as true and draws all reasonable inferences in favor of the plaintiff. See Indep. Trust Corp. v. Stewart Info. Servs. Corp., 665 F.3d 930, 934 (7th Cir. 2012). To survive a motion to dismiss, a complaint must contain allegations that state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face. Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662, 678 (2009). A claim is plausible on its face "when the plaintiff pleads factual content that allows the Court to draw the reasonable inference that the defendant is liable for the misconduct alleged." Id.
Illinois Bell has moved to dismiss Brown's FLSA and IMWL claims to the extent they seek to recover for conduct beyond the applicable limitations period, which under the FLSA is two years, or three for willful violations, and under the IMWL is three years. 29 U.S.C. § 255(a); 820 ILCS 105/12(a). Illinois Bell argues that the statute of limitations bars Brown from asserting claims based on any factual allegations that predate February 28, 2011, three years before the filing of the Tinoco action. For this reason, Illinois Bell contends, Brown's claims regarding pre-shift work—which Illinois Bell argues were never part of Blakes—are time-barred. Illinois Bell also argues that certainaspects of Brown's lunch break and post-shift work claims are time-barred to the extent they predate February 28, 2011 because those aspects of these claims were not alleged in the Blakes case.
Brown argues that his complaint, in its entirety, relates back to August 31, 2011, the date he opted into Blakes. Brown contends that Blakes, Tinoco, and the current case are all part of one continuous action. He argues that even if not all the claims he asserts in the present case were specifically laid out in Blakes, any added allegations are substantially similar to the allegations made in Blakes. For this reason, he argues, all of these claims—actually these parts of his claims—relate back to the date he opted into the Blakes case.
A number of judges in this district have dealt with these same issues in cases stemming from Blakes and Tinoco, with varying results. The Court has considered all of these decisions and finds Judge Amy St. Eve's decision in Ballard v. Illinois Bell Telephone Co., No. 15 C 2687, 2015 WL 6407574 (N.D. Ill. Oct. 21, 2015), to be the most persuasive among them. Judge St. Eve concluded that each of the claims made in separate complaint filed by the plaintiff in Ballard related back to the date the plaintiff opted into Blakes. Judge St. Eve reasoned that Ballard's suit was not a separate lawsuit but rather was part of Blakes, and thus the relation-back rule in Federal Rule...
To continue reading
Request your trial