Collins v. Southern New England Telephone Co., 3:08-cv-00595 (CSH).
| Citation | 617 F.Supp.2d 67 |
| Decision Date | 20 May 2009 |
| Docket Number | No. 3:08-cv-00595 (CSH).,3:08-cv-00595 (CSH). |
| Court | U.S. District Court — District of Connecticut |
| Parties | Aaron COLLINS, Plaintiff, v. SOUTHERN NEW ENGLAND TELEPHONE COMPANY, Defendant. |
Eugene N. Axelrod, Axelrod & Associates, LLC., Woodbridge, CT, for Plaintiff.
Andrea K. Hallier, Lori B. Alexander, Littler Mendelson, P.C., David J. Vegliante, Southern New England Telephone Co., New Haven, CT, for Defendant.
In this action asserting claims under federal and state civil rights statutes and the common law, defendant moves to dismiss all but the federal claim on the ground that the others are preempted by the Employee Retirement Security Act ("ERISA"), 29 U.S.C. § 1001, et seq.
Around the end of November, 2005, the Southern New England Telephone Company ("SNET") merged with AT & T,1 which at the time employed plaintiff Aaron Collins ("Collins"). Collins was one of many employees affected by the change in corporate ownership.
The following is a brief summary of Collins's allegations: Collins claims he was treated differently than his coworkers during this change in ownership. Specifically, other coworkers were sent letters that "offered the option to resign with severance based on years of service." Second Am. Compl. [doc. # 16] ¶ 15 [hereinafter "Complaint"]. Collins was not given this option, and was instead assigned to the position of "IT Project Manager," even though he was not qualified for that position. Collins resisted the assignment and "requested the offered severance." Id. ¶ 19. That request was denied, but SNET instead promised to offer him extensive training for the new position, which never materialized. Collins was assigned to projects he was not capable of completing, and "ultimately set-up to fail." Id. ¶ 25. This caused him to suffer anxiety, depression, and ultimately unspecified illness, for which he "was admitted into the hospital" and "medically removed from the workplace." Id. ¶¶ 28-29. Around that time, SNET terminated Collins's employment. Id. ¶ 29. The story ends there, in January, 2006 — only two months after SNET took over AT & T.
Collins asserts six counts. The first two counts are for racial discrimination, under Title VII and the corresponding Connecticut statute, and the next four common law counts are for intentional infliction of emotional distress, breach of contract, breach of the implied duty of good faith and fair dealing, and promissory estoppel.
On this motion to dismiss, SNET raises only one argument: that all of Collins's claims, save Count One under Title VII, are preempted by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 ("ERISA").
A motion to dismiss under Rule 12(b)(6) must be decided on "facts stated on the face of the complaint, in documents appended to the complaint or incorporated in the complaint by reference, and [ ] matters of which judicial notice may be taken." Leonard F. v. Israel Disc. Bank of N.Y., 199 F.3d 99, 107 (2d Cir.1999) (citation omitted); see also Roth v. Jennings, 489 F.3d 499, 509 (2d Cir.2007) .2 In deciding a motion to dismiss, well-pleaded facts must be accepted as true and considered in the light most favorable to the Plaintiff. Patane v. Clark, 508 F.3d 106, 111 (2d Cir.2007). The issue in deciding a motion to dismiss is "not whether the plaintiff will ultimately prevail but whether the plaintiff is entitled to offer evidence to support the claims." Villager Pond, Inc. v. Town of Darien, 56 F.3d 375, 378 (2d Cir.1995). The factual allegations made in the complaint "must be enough to raise a right to relief above the speculative level on the assumption that all of the complaint's allegations are true." Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544, 555, 127 S.Ct. 1955, 167 L.Ed.2d 929 (2007). This requires the complaint to contain "enough fact to raise a reasonable expectation that discovery will reveal evidence" of the plaintiff's claim. Id. at 556, 127 S.Ct. 1955.
Although SNET points to the factual standard of review on a motion to dismiss recently refined by Twombly, its only actual argument concerns the legal sufficiency of plaintiff's claims, as opposed to their plausibility from a factual perspective. Specifically, SNET argues that plaintiff's claims in Counts Two through Six are all preempted by federal law. I turn now to that issue.
With certain exceptions not relevant here, Section 514 of ERISA preempts "any and all State laws insofar as they may now or hereafter relate to any employee benefit plan." ERISA § 514(a), codified at 29 U.S.C. § 1144(a). The statute also defines "State laws" in such a way as to embrace common law claims and other judicially created law.3
The Supreme Court has dealt with the scope of this preemption in more than twenty cases since the law was passed in 1974, describing the provision as generating "an avalanche of litigation in the lower courts." De Buono v. NYSA-ILA Medical and Clinical Servs. Fund, 520 U.S. 806, 809 n. 1, 117 S.Ct. 1747, 138 L.Ed.2d 21 (1997).
In earlier cases, the Supreme Court repeatedly noted that ERISA preemption was "deliberately expansive, and designed to establish pension plan regulation as exclusively a federal concern." Pilot Life Ins. Co. v. Dedeaux, 481 U.S. 41, 46, 107 S.Ct. 1549, 95 L.Ed.2d 39 (1987); see also, e.g., FMC Corp. v. Holliday, 498 U.S. 52, 58, 111 S.Ct. 403, 112 L.Ed.2d 356 (1990) (). The breadth of this preemption was grounded in the statute's unqualified phrase "insofar as they . . . relate to any employee benefit plan." (emphasis added).
However, the concept of ERISA preemption underwent a material alteration when the Supreme Court decided N.Y. State Conf. of Blue Cross & Blue Shield Plans v. Travelers Ins. Co., 514 U.S. 645, 655, 115 S.Ct. 1671, 131 L.Ed.2d 695 (1995). In Travelers, the question presented was whether ERISA preempted a state statute's provisions requiring hospitals to collect surcharges from patients whose commercial insurance coverage was purchased by employee health-care plans governed by ERISA, and subjecting certain health maintenance organizations (HMOs) to surcharges insofar as their membership fees were paid by an ERISA plan. In a unanimous opinion, the Court held "that the provisions for surcharges do not `relate to' employee benefit plans within the meaning of ERISA's pre-emption provision, § 514(a), 29 U.S.C. § 1144(a), and accordingly suffer no pre-emption." Id. at 649, 115 S.Ct. 1671. The Travelers Court steered a course away from the "clearly expansive" text of ERISA's § 514(a), reasoning that "if `relate to' were taken to extend to the furthest reach of its indeterminancy, then for all practical purposes pre-emption would never run its course, for really, universally, relations stop nowhere." Id. at 655, 115 S.Ct. 1671 (citation and internal quotation marks omitted.).4 In Travelers, the Court rejected that limitless concept of relationship, noted its earlier decisions declaring "the starting presumption that Congress does not intend to supplant state law," id. at 654, 115 S.Ct. 1671 (citations omitted), and said of the phrase "relate to" as used in ERISA: "We simply must go beyond the unhelpful text and the frustrating difficulty of defining its key term, and look instead to the objectives of the ERISA statute as a guide to the scope of the state law that Congress understood would survive." Id. at 656, 115 S.Ct. 1671. Applying that test, the state statute in Travelers survived preemption.
The Second Circuit has described the Supreme Court's opinion in Travelers as having "greatly narrowed" the scope of preemption. Hattem v. Schwarzenegger, 449 F.3d 423, 428 (2d Cir.2006); id. at 430; see also id. at 431 .5
Since Travelers, those arguing for preemption must also overcome a "heavy burden" of a presumption that Congress does not usually intend to preempt "the historic police powers of the States." Hattem, 449 F.3d at 428. The Second Circuit claims to have "anticipated Travelers" in 1989, when it upheld Connecticut's escheat statute, "noting that we would not supersede `the historic police powers of the States . . . unless that was the clear and manifest purpose of Congress.'" Gerosa v. Savasta, 329 F.3d at 327 (quoting Aetna Life Ins. Co. v. Borges, 869 F.2d 142, 144-45 (2d Cir.1989)); see also Travelers, 514 U.S. at 655, 115 S.Ct. 1671 (). See also Cal. Div'n of Labor Stds. Enforcement v. Dillingham Constr., N.A., 519 U.S. 316, 325, 117 S.Ct. 832, 136 L.Ed.2d 791 (1997); De Buono, 520 U.S. at 814 n. 8, 117 S.Ct. 1747 (1997).
But it cannot be said that in Travelers, the Court entirely abandoned its earlier holdings on preemption. Tensions remained between Travelers and those prior cases. Two years later, the Court found it necessary to explain how its prior holdings were consistent with Travelers. The...
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...plaintiff was not a participant in an ERISA plan, and therefore her claims could not be preempted by ERISA); Collins v. S. New Eng. Tel. Co., 617 F. Supp. 2d 67, 84 (D. Conn. 2009) (finding that plaintiffs' state law claims for racial discrimination, intentional infliction of emotional dist......
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