Foster v. Ruhrpumpen, Inc.
| Decision Date | 30 April 2004 |
| Docket Number | No. 03-5101.,03-5101. |
| Citation | 365 F.3d 1191 |
| Parties | Jim FOSTER; Dwight Moore; Ray O'Bryan; Roger Kilgore; Paul Jones; Keith Roberts; Maynard Castoe; Jerry Harp; Douglas Brannon; Mike Taylor; David Houston; Joel Jakubowski; Donald Boyles; Deetta Hawkins; Cecil Zornes; Benny Morrison; Matthew Kissire; Jim Miller; Pam Duncan, Special Administrator for the Estate of Dwayne Duncan; Jack McKerrell; Jerry Decker; James Hill; Vernon Harris; Johnny Bailey; John Palmer; Lawrence Blackbourn; and Danny Postrach, Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. RUHRPUMPEN, INC., Defendant-Appellee. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Tenth Circuit |
Steven R. Hickman, Frasier, Frasier & Hickman, LLP, Tulsa, OK, for Plaintiffs-Appellants.
Randall G. Vaughn (Kevin P. Doyle and John L. Randolph, Jr., with him on the brief), Pray, Walker, Jackman, Williamson & Marlar, Tulsa, OK, for Defendant-Appellee.
Before HENRY, HOLLOWAY, and O'BRIEN, Circuit Judges.
Jim Foster and twenty-six other individual plaintiffs filed this action against Ruhrpumpen, Inc., alleging that Ruhrpumpen violated their rights under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), 29 U.S.C. §§ 621-634, by failing to retain them as employees after purchasing the pump manufacturing plant at which they had worked. The district court granted summary judgment to Ruhrpumpen, holding that 1) the plaintiffs were never employed by Ruhrpumpen and therefore could not sue Ruhrpumpen for wrongful termination; 2) the plaintiffs never filed a failure to hire claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and the court was therefore without jurisdiction to hear such a claim; and 3) the four plaintiffs who failed to file with the EEOC could not "piggyback" on the claims of the plaintiffs who did file. The plaintiffs now appeal.
We agree with the district court that the plaintiffs cannot assert wrongful termination claims because they were never employed by Ruhrpumpen. However, we disagree with the district court's analysis of the plaintiffs' failure to hire claims.
In particular, as to the twenty-three plaintiffs who filed charges of age discrimination with the EEOC, we conclude that those charges sufficiently identified the parties and the action or practices at issue. Accordingly, the charges satisfy the administrative exhaustion requirement, see 29 C.F.R. § 1601.12(b), and those plaintiffs thus exhausted their failure to hire claims. As to the four plaintiffs who did not file charges with the EEOC, we conclude that their failure to hire claims may be heard by the district court pursuant to the single filing or "piggybacking" rule. Those four plaintiffs are similarly situated to the plaintiffs who did file failure to hire charges, and their claims arose out of the same circumstances and occurred within the same general time frame as the exhausted claims. Therefore, we reverse the district court's grant of summary judgment to Ruhrpumpen and remand for further proceedings.
Prior to January 2001, the plaintiffs were employed by a pump manufacturing plant known as Flowserve, Inc., located in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In late 1999 or early 2000, Flowserve entered into an agreement to purchase another pump manufacturer called IDP. Subsequent to this development and as a result of action taken by the United States Department of Justice, Flowserve was ordered to divest itself of its Tulsa facility. In November 2000, Flowserve and Defendant Ruhrpumpen, Inc., entered into an agreement pursuant to which the Tulsa facility would be sold and transferred from Flowserve to Ruhrpumpen. The agreement established the end of December 2000 as a target date for the closing and transfer of the Flowserve facility. Prior to the transfer, Flowserve advised all its employees that "[w]ith the sale, each employee is effectively terminated from employment with Flowserve" and that severance benefits would be provided to all former Flowserve employees who were not re-hired by Ruhrpumpen. Aplts' App. at 182.
Leading up to the transfer, Don McCourt, the President of Ruhrpumpen and former Operations Manager of Flowserve, asked Michael Brantley, the Superintendent of Production at both Flowserve and Ruhrpumpen, to perform an assessment of the number of employees needed to run the plant after the sale. Mr. Brantley estimated that Ruhupumpen would need approximately ninety production and maintenance employees to operate the plant at the desired annual sales volume of between $30 and $35 million. Prior to the transfer, 120 production and maintenance workers were employed at the Flowserve plant.
In November 2000, the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers International Union (hereinafter "PACE" or "the Union") representing the production workers at the Flowserve plant, was informed that only ninety-four production and maintenance employees would be needed following the transfer. PACE entered into negotiations with Flowserve management to determine which ninety-four employees would be retained. At PACE's insistence, management agreed to retain employees based entirely on seniority by classification.
Twenty-six former production and maintenance workers were laid off pursuant to the Union negotiations and were given separation packages prior to December 29, 2000. The remaining ninety-four production and maintenance workers reported for their first day of work with Ruhrpumpen on January 3, 2001. Id. at 206. They then learned that only fifty-seven employees had been re-hired by Ruhrpumpen. The other thirty-seven former Flowserve employees present on January 3 were processed for severance benefits. The plaintiffs make up the bulk of this group.
After learning that they would not be retaining their jobs, all but four of the plaintiffs filed charges of age discrimination with the Oklahoma Human Rights Commission and the EEOC. The charges state:
1. I am over forty years of age and have years of experience at the plant. I was doing satisfactory work when terminated on 3 Jan. 2001.
2. They terminated me and numerous others on 3 Jan. 2001, almost all of whom were older than the retained employees, who were younger than those let go.
3. A significant motivating factor was age-based factors [sic].
4. This charge is made on behalf of all others similarly situated.
Id. at 144-68 (). The charges identify Ruhrpumpen as the employer responsible for the discrimination and state that the discrimination occurred on January 3, 2001.
On July 24, 2001, the plaintiffs filed a petition in the Oklahoma District Court for Tulsa County, alleging wrongful termination and failure to hire in violation of the ADEA. Ruhrpumpen then removed the case to the United States District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma and filed a motion for summary judgment. The district court granted summary judgment to Ruhrpumpen, holding that the plaintiffs could not sue Ruhrpumpen for wrongful termination because they were never employed by Ruhrpumpen and that they had failed to exhaust their failure to hire claims with the EEOC.
In this appeal, the plaintiffs challenge the grant of summary judgment to Ruhrpumpen on their failure to hire claims. "We review a summary judgment grant de novo and apply the same legal standard used by the district court." Jones v. Barnhart, 349 F.3d 1260, 1265 (10th Cir.2003). We consider the two groups of plaintiffs separately, beginning with 1) the twenty-three plaintiffs who filed age discrimination charges with the EEOC ("Group l"), and then proceeding to 2) the four plaintiffs who did not file any such charges ("Group 2"). As to the first group, we conclude that the filed charges were sufficient to satisfy the ADEA's exhaustion requirement. As to the second group, we conclude that the single filing or "piggybacking" rule allows their claims to proceed in the district court despite their failure to file individual charges with the EEOC.
As noted above, all but four of the plaintiffs in this action timely filed charges of age discrimination with the EEOC. However, in their EEOC charges, these plaintiffs alleged that they were "terminated" by Ruhrpumpen. Aplts' App. at 144-68. Ruhrpumpen argues that the plaintiffs' wrongful termination claims cannot succeed because termination by Ruhrpumpen is a necessary element of such claims, and employment must precede termination. As Ruhrpumpen never actually employed the plaintiffs, it argues, this element is not satisfied.
The evidence is fairly clear that the plaintiffs were terminated by Flowserve, not by Ruhrpumpen, and that Ruhrpumpen never officially re-hired them. The plaintiffs may have been under the impression that they were retaining their jobs due to confusion stemming from the Union negotiations, but there is no evidence to suggest that they ever received word from Ruhrpumpen that they had been officially hired as Ruhrpumpen employees.
The plaintiffs' failure to hire claims seem to more accurately describe the discrimination that allegedly occurred. However, the Group 1 plaintiffs did not use the language "failure to hire" in the charges they filed with the EEOC. Pointing to this omission, Ruhrpumpen argues that the plaintiffs failed to exhaust their failure to hire claims, and that as a result, the court lacks jurisdiction to consider the claims. The district court agreed with that analysis. Aplts' App. at 265 (Dist. Ct. Order, filed June 11, 2003) ("No charge has been filed by any Plaintiff based upon a failure to hire by Ruhrpumpen based upon age discrimination."). The central question in this case is, therefore, whether the Group 1 plaintiffs' EEOC charges were sufficient to exhaust their failure to hire claims.
"[A] plaintiff normally may not bring a Title VII action based upon claims that were not part of a timely-filed EEOC charge for which the plaintiff has received a right-to-sue letter."1 Simms v. Oklahoma ...
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