Hoffman v. United Telecommunications, Inc.

• Decision Date: 08 December 1983
• Docket Number: Civ. No. 76-223-C2.
• Citation: 575 F. Supp. 1463
• Parties: Phyllis Wilson HOFFMAN, Plaintiff, and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Plaintiff-Intervenor, v. UNITED TELECOMMUNICATIONS, INC., et al., Defendants.
• Court: U.S. District Court — District of Kansas

575 F. Supp. 1463

Phyllis Wilson HOFFMAN, Plaintiff and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Plaintiff-Intervenor, v. UNITED TELECOMMUNICATIONS, INC., et al., Defendants.

Civ. No. 76-223-C2.

United States District Court, D. Kansas.

December 8, 1983.

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL OMITTED

Karen A. Plax, Plax & Cochet, Kansas City, Mo., David J. Waxse, Payne & Jones, Chtd., Olathe, Kan., for plaintiff.

Lamont White, Trial Atty., E.E.O.C., Ofc. of Gen. Counsel, Washington, D.C., Amanda Meers, Asst. U.S. Atty., D. Kan., Kansas City, Kan., for plaintiff-intervenor.

Karl F. Schmidt, Byron J. Beck, T. Nelson Mann, Morrison, Hecker, Curtis, Kuder & Parrish, Kansas City, Mo., Edward Boddington, Boddington & Brown, Kansas City, Kan., for defendants.

MEMORANDUM AND ORDER

SAFFELS, District Judge.

This employment discrimination action was filed pursuant to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. § 2000e, et seq., in 1976 by plaintiff Phyllis Wilson Hoffman. The action named as defendants Ms. Hoffman's former employer, United Systems Services, Inc. USSI, its holding company parent corporation, United Telecommunications, Inc. UTI, and thirty-eight other subsidiaries of UTI which are located throughout the country. Plaintiff asserts not only her individual claim of employment discrimination against USSI on the basis of her sex, but also acts on behalf of "all females who are, were, or might be employed by the defendants in managerial and professional positions" in asserting potential class action claims against all thirty-eight defendants.

The summonses, complaints and attachments in this matter were served on UTI and USSI by serving Paul H. Henson, the Registered Agent for said corporations, on November 16, 1976. Service of process was also made upon Henson for the remaining thirty-eight defendants. On December 29, 1976, answers were filed on behalf of UTI and USSI which did not challenge jurisdiction, service of process nor venue. The remaining thirty-eight defendants, however, filed motions to dismiss raising various objections. For case in referring to the remaining thirty-eight defendants, the court has divided them into two groups. The first group contains twenty-three defendants, beginning with Carolina Telephone and Telegraph Company, and will be referred to as "the Carolina defendants." These defendants filed motions to quash service of process and to dismiss on the basis of improper service of process, lack of personal jurisdiction and improper venue. The remaining group of fifteen defendants, beginning with Capitol City Telephone Company, will be referred to as "the Capitol City defendants." Each of these defendants filed a motion to dismiss raising only improper service of process.

After nearly six years of discovery on the jurisdictional issues alone, defense counsel have submitted their proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law and memoranda in support of their motions to dismiss and to quash, and plaintiff's counsel have responded with their memoranda in opposition. Although Judge Earl E. O'Connor, in his Memorandum and Order of September 21, 1977, wherein discovery was limited solely to jurisdictional issues and not inclusive of the class action issues, requested that the parties submit short, concise memoranda of their positions on said motions to dismiss upon completion of discovery, counsel could not restrain themselves, and have deluged the court with several mammoth briefs each containing an average page length in excess of seventy-five pages. In addition, plaintiff submitted for the court's perusal and inspection three boxes of documents and exhibits consisting of approximately six hundred and fifty documents. Although the court has given due consideration to all exhibits, depositions, memoranda of law and proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law submitted by all parties, the court will not make an attempt to meet each finding individually. The court has, rather, attempted to pare down the mountain of information before it so that an orderly and brief discussion of the issues may ensue.

As was noted above, this is a Title VII action brought by plaintiff against her former employer, USSI, its parent company, UTI, and thirty-eight subsidiaries. Ms. Hoffman was employed by USSI in its Industrial Relations Department in Westwood, Kansas, from February 14, 1972, until May 9, 1975. In her complaint filed with this court on November 5, 1976, Ms. Hoffman alleged that USSI discriminated against her on the basis of her sex with respect to her initial job assignment, her training and advancement opportunities, her salary and responsibility levels, and her termination. Moreover, in her complaint she asserts class-wide sex discrimination claims against all defendants with respect to job classification and assignments, promotions, recruitment and hiring, transfers, compensation, job responsibilities, participation in management development programs, and exclusion from employment on the basis of characteristics generally attributable to women. She further states in her complaint: "The class which plaintiff represents is composed of all females who are, were, or might be employed by the defendants in managerial or professional positions at its headquarters in Westwood, Kansas, and all offices of its subsidiaries and affiliates, and who have been, or continue to be, or might be adversely affected by the practices complained of herein."

After a general review of the circumstances of these proceedings, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission hereinafter EEOC intervened in this action to promote the public policy of eliminating and preventing discriminatory employment practices based upon sex.

PERSONAL JURISDICTION

Having generally reviewed the history of this case itself, the court is now prepared to turn to the substantive motions before it. First, the court will address the motions filed by the Carolina defendants in which they object to personal jurisdiction, service of process and venue. As to these three areas of objection, the court will address first the issue of personal jurisdiction.

Before the initial inquiry as to jurisdiction may be probed, the court must note that where the power of the federal court is invoked not on the grounds of diversity of citizenship, but because a federal right is claimed, i.e., on the ground that the matter in controversy arises under the constitution, laws or treaties of the United States, the limitations upon the courts of a state do not control a federal court sitting in that state. Angel v. Bullington, 330 U.S. 183, 67 S.Ct. 657, 91 L.Ed. 832 (1947). Holmberg v. Armbrecht, 327 U.S. 392, 66 S.Ct. 582, 90 L.Ed. 743 (1946).

In Wright and Miller, Federal Practice and Procedure: Civil § 1075 (1969 Ed.), 1983 Supp., it is stated:

"The general practice in federal question cases has been that questions of whether a foreign corporation is amenable to process are determined in accordance with concepts of due process developed with reference to state long-arm statutes. Thus, the critical question presented is whether the corporation has sufficient minimum contacts with the forum state to permit the exercise of jurisdiction over it...."

Id. at 143-44.

Accordingly, the court's inquiry will not begin with a search for whether the state has provided for bringing the foreign corporation into its courts via a long-arm statute, but rather will center solely on the question of whether the constitutional due process requirements of "minimum contacts" with the forum have been satisfied.

Originally courts recognized three traditional bases of personal jurisdiction: physical presence, consent and residence. The early cases which addressed questions of personal jurisdiction over non-resident individual defendants or over foreign corporations determined that finding jurisdiction according to one of these bases was essential to due process of law as contemplated in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. These cases found due process to have been violated where a court rendered a personal judgment against a non-resident defendant merely by serving process upon him outside the forum or by publication. See Pennoyer v. Neff, 95 U.S. (5 Otto) 714, 24 L.Ed. 565 (1877). It was thought that a judgment would be enforceable only if the non-resident was somehow present within the territorial boundaries of the state in which the court was sitting. This rationale tended to equate jurisdiction with power to enforce a judgment.

In 1945, however, the United States Supreme Court, in International Shoe Co. v. Washington, 326 U.S. 310, 66 S.Ct. 154, 90 L.Ed. 95 (1945), addressed the question of jurisdiction over a foreign corporation, and in so doing undertook a clear break with the Pennoyer theory and substantially advanced a state's jurisdiction over foreign corporations. In International Shoe, and its progeny, the inquiry into the State's jurisdiction over a foreign corporation appropriately focused not on whether the corporation was "present" within the forum, but on whether there had been such contacts between the forum state and the foreign corporation as would make it "reasonable, in the context of our federal system of government, to require the corporation to defend the particular suit which is brought there." Id. 326 U.S. at 317, 66 S.Ct. at 158.

In International Shoe, the court stated a comprehensive new approach to the whole question of state judicial jurisdiction and rejected the jurisdictional requirement that a non-resident defendant be "present" within the forum before service of process on the non-resident and jurisdiction would be proper and in accordance with due process. The court, without overruling the older cases which had founded jurisdiction on presence or consent, set out a new test with now famous factors that weigh in the balance of interests and control the determination of whether the exercise of jurisdiction over a non-resident meets...