Longcrier v. Hl-a Co., Inc.

• Decision Date: 10 December 2008
• Docket Number: No. 08-0011-WS-C.,08-0011-WS-C.
• Citation: 595 F.Supp.2d 1218
• Parties: Deborah V. LONGCRIER, et al., Plaintiffs, v. HL-A CO., INC., Defendant.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Southern District of Alabama

595 F.Supp.2d 1218

Deborah V. LONGCRIER, et al., Plaintiffs, v. HL-A CO., INC., Defendant.

Civil Action No. 08-0011-WS-C.

United States District Court, S.D. Alabama, Northern Division.

December 10, 2008.

Order Denying Reconsideration January 23, 3009.

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL OMITTED

Allen D. Arnold, David R. Arendall, Birmingham, AL, for Plaintiffs.

Austin Evans Smith, Marcel L. De-Bruge, Ronald W. Flowers, Jr., Ashley Heron Hattaway, Burr & Forman LLP, Birmingham, AL, for Defendant.

ORDER

WILLIAM H. STEELE, District Judge.

This matter comes before the Court on an array of pending motions, including Plaintiffs' Motion for Conditional Class Certification and to Facilitate Court-Approved Notice (doc. 38), Plaintiffs' Motion to Toll Statute of Limitations (doc. 41), Defendant's Motion to Strike Certain Documents (doc. 46), and Plaintiffs' Motion to Strike and/or Motion for Protective Order (doc. 52). All of these motions are contested and have been the subject of extensive briefing and evidentiary submissions. They are now ripe for disposition.¹

I. Background.

In their First Amended and Restated Complaint (doc. 37), the six named plaintiffs (collectively, "Plaintiffs"),² seeking to proceed on behalf of themselves and others similarly situated, brought claims against defendant, HL-A Co., Inc. ("HA"), for alleged violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act, 29 U.S.C. §§ 201, et seq. ("FLSA"). All Plaintiffs are alleged to be hourly, nonexempt employees who are or were employed by HL-A in various capacities at its automobile parts manufacturing facility in Selma, Alabama.

The three specific FLSA violations enumerated in the Amended Complaint are as follows: (a) a claim that HL-A willfully violated the FLSA by causing or allowing Plaintiffs and similarly situated employees to work "off the clock" without pay during scheduled 30-minute lunch breaks, in violation of 29 C.F.R. § 785.19;³ (b) a claim that HL-A willfully violated the FLSA by adopting a rounding policy pursuant to which Plaintiffs' and similarly situated employees' time worked was always rounded down to the 15-minute increment that most favored the employer, in violation of 29 C.F.R. § 785.48(b); and (c) a claim that HL-A willfully violated the FLSA by requiring Plaintiffs and other similarly situated employees to work "off the clock" prior to and subsequent to their scheduled work shifts for HL-A's benefit, without additional compensation.⁴ With respect to each of these alleged violations, Plaintiffs' theory is that HL-A, by virtue of this conduct, has failed to pay them statutorily required overtime compensation of 1.5 times their regular hourly rate for all hours worked in excess of 40 in a workweek.⁵

Count Five of the Amended Complaint is captioned "Opt-In Collective Action" and states that Plaintiffs are bringing this case "as an opt-in collective action pursuant to 29 U.S.C. § 216(b)." (Doc. 37, ¶ 48.) According to this pleading, "[t]he potential class is comprised of any and all persons employed as hourly employees by Defendant at any time during the three (3) years preceding the filing of the Complaint, January 9, 2008." (Id., ¶ 49.) This claim, and Plaintiffs' attempt to proceed as a § 216(b) collective action, with court-supervised notice to prospective opt-in plaintiffs, lies at the heart of the parties' many voluminous filings in recent months.

II. Cross-Motions to Strike.

Before reaching the merits of the Motion for Conditional Class Certification, the Court is constrained to address the parties' respective evidentiary objections to each other's filings. To the extent that the propriety of conditional class certification hinges on the record materials before the Court, each party's objections to the evidentiary materials proffered by its counterpart must be adjudicated before the contours of the record can be fixed for purposes of the conditional class certification analysis.

A. Defendant's Motion to Strike.

In its Motion to Strike, HL-A requests that Plaintiffs' Exhibits 35, 36, and 37 be stricken because they are "unauthenticated summaries which have not been established to be based on admissible material or accurate and thus do not have any indicia of reliability." (Doc. 46, ¶ 1.)⁶

Plaintiffs' Exhibit 35 is a spreadsheet purporting to recite plaintiff Deborah Longcrier's daily time records from July 19, 2004 through July 19, 2007, and to demonstrate and quantify discrepancies between Longcrier's actual hours worked and the lower hours for which she was compensated because of HL-A's alleged rounding and off-clock pay practices. (Doc. 40-36, at 2-17.) Exhibit 35 includes an estimate that Longcrier is owed 102.5 hours of overtime compensation for that three-year period, totaling $1,636.07 in unpaid overtime. (Id. at 17.)⁷ Plaintiffs' Brief in Support of Motion for Conditional Class Certification (doc. 39) adequately explains what Exhibit 35 is, such that its import is readily ascertainable. (Doc. 39, at 2, 19.)

Plaintiffs' Exhibit 36 purports to summarize time records for a putative class member, Derrick Brown, and to show analogous disparities between his clock time and paid time for certain intervals in 2005 and 2006. (Doc. 40-37, at 2-3.) Once again, Plaintiffs' brief explains what Exhibit 36 is and how it relates to their class certification arguments. (Doc. 39, at 2, 19.) Similarly, Plaintiffs' Exhibit 37 purports to summarize excerpts of time records of more than two dozen opt-in plaintiffs, demonstrating similar discrepancies between clock time and paid time because of rounding and/or off-clock pay practices. (Doc. 40-38.) As with the other two contested exhibits, Plaintiffs' briefs explain the significance and their interpretation of Exhibit 37. (Doc. 39, at 2, 19.)

Notwithstanding the fact that the meaning of Exhibits 35 through 37 is quite plain, and that these exhibits are on their face summaries of records that HL-A itself furnished to Plaintiffs during the discovery process, Defendant objects to all three summaries for not having been authenticated in accordance with Rule 901, Fed.R.Evid., and for lacking proper foundation that the summaries are accurate.

There are at least three flaws with Defendant's argument. First, and most fundamentally, the premise undergirding Defendant's Motion to Strike, for which no authorities have been cited, is that all prerequisites of admissibility must be satisfied before these exhibits may be considered at the conditional class certification stage. But this Court is not admitting any of the parties' hundreds of pages of exhibits into evidence at this time. This case is not in trial. This is not an evidentiary hearing. The general rule in this Circuit is that parties' exhibits may be considered for purposes of pretrial rulings so long as they can be reduced to admissible form at trial. See, e.g., Rowell v. BellSouth Corp., 433 F.3d 794, 800 (11th Cir.2005) ("On motions for summary judgment, we may consider only that evidence which can be reduced to an admissible form."); U.S. Aviation Underwriters, Inc. v. Yellow Freight System, Inc., 296 F.Supp.2d 1322, 1327 n. 2 (S.D.Ala.2003) (documents need not be properly authenticated to be considered at summary judgment where it is apparent that they can be reduced to admissible, authenticated form at trial). Defendant has proffered no legal or equitable argument why that general rule governing consideration of exhibits should not attach here.⁸ Second, Plaintiffs have explained, and Defendant has never contested, that the exhibits in question "were prepared exclusively from documents provided by Defendant." (Doc. 51, ¶ 1.) Defendant does not suggest that it ever contacted Plaintiffs to discuss any legitimate concerns or questions it may have had concerning these exhibits, much less that it emerged from such discussions unsatisfied. By all appearances, then, Defendant's Motion to Strike was prompted not by bona fide concern that these exhibits are incomprehensible or contain fabricated data, but instead by a desire to multiply these proceedings and inconvenience Plaintiffs by obliging them to comply with a technical standard that is not required at this juncture. Third, in any event, Defendant's Motion to Strike prompted Plaintiffs to file a 448-page Supplemental Evidentiary Submission (doc. 50), including a seven-page affidavit setting forth in considerable detail the HL-A records from which the summaries were generated, the meaning of each column in those summaries, and the process through which those exhibits were prepared, as well as copies of the underlying time records from which these summaries were generated. HL-A has identified no evidentiary infirmities in Plaintiffs' supplemental materials; therefore, presumably Defendant's technical objections to Exhibits 35-37 have been allayed by Plaintiffs' curative showing.

The net effect of Defendant's Motion to Strike, then, is that Plaintiffs have been forced to perform additional work, the court file has been clogged with hundreds of pages of unnecessary backup documentation, and scarce judicial resources have been diverted to address a Motion to Strike predicated not on substantive concerns regarding the content of the summaries, but instead on dogmatic enforcement of a rigorous evidentiary standard that Defendant assumes applies to this stage of the proceedings.⁹ Defendant's Motion to Strike is denied.

B. Plaintiffs' Motion to Strike and/or for Protective Order.

1. Relevant Background.

Plaintiffs' Motion to Strike attacks on legal, procedural and ethical grounds Defendant's Exhibit 13, which consists of 245 one-page typewritten declarations (the "Declarations") signed by HL-A employees on January 15 and 16, 2008. (See doc. 48-14, at 2-246.)¹⁰ These Declarations are nearly identical from one declarant to the next, and contain numerous admissions by HL-A employees which on their face may be detrimental to those individuals' ability to join the action and to pursue the FLSA claims...