N.A.A.C.P., Jefferson County Branch v. U.S. Sugar Corp.

• Decision Date: 21 August 1996
• Docket Number: Nos. 95-5044,95-5110,s. 95-5044
• Citation: 84 F.3d 1432
• Parties: NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR the ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE, JEFFERSON COUNTY BRANCH, et al., Appellees, v. UNITED STATES SUGAR CORPORATION and Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida, Appellants.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — District of Columbia Circuit

Page 1432

84 F.3d 1432

318 U.S.App.D.C. 58

NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR the ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE JEFFERSON COUNTY BRANCH, et al., Appellees, v. UNITED STATES SUGAR CORPORATION and Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative of Florida, Appellants.

Nos. 95-5044, 95-5110.

United States Court of Appeals District of Columbia Circuit.

Argued March 22, 1996.

Decided May 28, 1996.

Rehearing Denied Aug. 21, 1996.

Appeals from the United States District Court for the District of Columbia (82cv02315). Vincent C. Costantino, Assistant Counsel, U.S. Department of Labor, and John M. Simpson, Washington, DC, argued the causes for appellants. With them on the briefs were Eric H. Holder, Jr., United States Attorney, R. Craig Lawrence and Michael J. Ryan, Assistant United States Attorneys, Harry L. Sheinfeld, Counsel, U.S. Department of Labor, and Robert A. Burgoyne, Washington, DC. Robert E. Muraro and Sarah L. Schweitzer entered appearances pro hac vice for the United States Sugar Corporation.

Edward J. Tuddenham, Austin, TX, argued the cause for appellees. With him on the brief was Robert A. Williams, Tallahassee, FL. Bruce Goldstein, Washington, DC, and Shelley Davis, Chicago, IL, entered appearances.

Before: GINSBURG, RANDOLPH, and TATEL, Circuit Judges.

Opinion for the Court filed by Circuit Judge RANDOLPH.

RANDOLPH, Circuit Judge:

In 1982, the Jefferson County Branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and six named farm workers filed this class action against the Department of Labor in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Fourteen years, three dismissals, and six Secretaries of Labor later, these plaintiffs ask us to send this case back to that court for a hearing on the Department's interpretation of regulations governing certifications no longer sought for workers no longer employed under a pay system no longer in place for a harvesting method no longer in use. We must decline the invitation.

I

This tale of government regulation, grower certification and perpetual litigation began with apples. In 1982, plaintiffs challenged the Department's interpretation of its temporary foreign worker program as applied to certain West Virginia apple growers. The program allowed a grower to import foreign farm workers only upon the Department's certification that there were not enough domestic workers to meet the grower's needs and that importing foreign workers would not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of similarly situated domestic farm workers. To implement wage protection, the Department each year calculated something called the "adverse effect wage rate," or "AEWR," an hourly wage which growers had to promise to pay both domestic and foreign workers in order to receive foreign-worker certification.

The AEWR worked well enough for growers who paid workers by the hour, but it presented an opportunity for abuse by growers who paid workers by the piece. Consider, for instance, a grower operating under a piece-rate system who promises to meet an AEWR of $5 per hour by paying 50 cents per bushel of apples picked. This would be acceptable only if an average farm worker picked 10 bushels per hour. But what if the AEWR increased the following year to $6 per hour? Then the grower could purport to meet it either by raising the rate to 60 cents per bushel or by representing that the average farm worker would pick 12, rather than 10, bushels per hour. To prevent the latter, the Department promulgated a regulation requiring growers to raise their rates, not their productivity expectations, when the AEWR increased. 20 C.F.R. § 655.207(c).

In their 1982 complaint, the plaintiffs alleged that the Department misinterpreted this regulation when it preliminarily certified West Virginia apple growers despite the fact that they had effectively increased their productivity expectations from one year to the next by changing the piece-rate from a per-bushel to a per-box basis. The district court agreed, ultimately entering a judgment interpreting the regulation to preclude the West Virginia apple growers from increasing their productivity expectations above the original levels they proposed in 1977 and to require growers to increase their piece-rates in proportion to the annual increases in the AEWR. NAACP v. Donovan, 558 F.Supp. 218 (D.D.C.1982). The court then ordered the Department to condition all future foreign-worker certifications upon the applicant's conforming to those requirements. Id. Thus ended the apple phase of the case. The sugar cane phase began in 1986, when the plaintiffs--some of whom worked as both apple-pickers and sugar-cane cutters--filed a motion for further relief alleging that the Department was not enforcing its piece-rate regulations in the sugar cane industry. At the time, Florida sugar cane growers paid their workers according to a "task-rate" system. Under it, workers were paid per row of sugar cane harvested, with the value of any particular row adjusted to reflect the degree of difficulty in harvesting it. The Department argued that this task-rate system was not a piece-rate system and therefore was not subject to the regulation. The Department conceded, however, that the administrative record was not adequate to resolve the issue, and on September 25, 1986, the district court ordered it to gather the information necessary to determine how the sugar cane growers paid their workers, whether that method amounted to a piece-rate system, and if it did, whether the rates paid under that method comported with the court's 1982 decision.

The Department responded with a draft report in 1987. It took another five years for the Department to prepare the final version of the report; the delay was due, in large part, to battles between the plaintiffs and sugar growers over the third-party discovery the district court had granted the plaintiffs in order to prepare their response to the draft report. During the delay, the Department replaced the original piece-rate regulation, 20 C.F.R. § 655.207(c), with a new one, 20 C.F.R. § 655.202(B)(2). In response, the district court allowed the plaintiffs to file a second supplemental complaint challenging both regulations, and then permitted United States Sugar Corporation and the Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative ("the growers") to intervene in the case. But when the plaintiffs attempted to add the intervenors as defendants, the district court decided that, because the Department was still preparing its final report, the case should be dismissed without prejudice subject to the plaintiffs' "right to reopen the case" by telephoning the court's clerk anytime after April 1993, the court's deadline for the Department to finish its report.

Seven months after the April 1993 deadline passed, the Department finished the report and filed it with the district court. The Department found that the sugar growers did not pay their workers by a piece-rate and that the certifications granted those growers therefore had not violated either the original or the new piece-rate regulation. The plaintiffs immediately filed a motion to re-open the case. In response, the Department and the growers moved to dismiss on various jurisdictional grounds. During a hearing on the morning of December 16, 1993, the district court said it would dismiss the case again. Later that day, the court reconsidered and issued an order vacating the dismissal and setting a briefing schedule "to govern the final disposition of this case."

Two months later, the district court issued an opinion and order rejecting the jurisdictional arguments the defendants had raised before the dismissal and reinstatement. NAACP v. United States Sec'y of Labor, 846 F.Supp. 91 (D.D.C.1994). Thereafter, all of the parties filed motions for summary judgment. On September 22, 1994, the district court granted the farm workers' motion for summary judgment "but only to the extent that the conclusions within the Department of Labor's Final Report cannot be upheld." NAACP v. United States Sec'y of Labor, 865 F.Supp. 903, 926 (D.D.C.1994). In an accompanying opinion, the court rejected the report's conclusions as arbitrary and capricious, id. at 910, and identified certain issues left to be resolved in light of that rejection, id. at 922. The court said it was prepared to conduct an evidentiary hearing to take testimony on those issues, id. at 925, and it directed the parties to file a joint pleading setting out "an orderly framework for the presentation of all necessary issues." Id. at 927. Upon receiving the joint pleading, the court entered an order scheduling discovery, dispositive motions, and an evidentiary hearing. The growers responded by filing an emergency writ of mandamus and something they called a "protective notice of appeal." We denied the mandamus relief on November 17, 1994, and dismissed the appeal on March 8, 1995.

On December 22, 1994, the Department filed in the district court a renewed motion for summary judgment. The motion prompted the third dismissal of the case: on February 6, 1995, the district court, apparently reconsidering the need for an evidentiary hearing, dismissed the case without prejudice and remanded it to the Department for consideration of the remaining issues raised in the court's September 22 order. NAACP v. United States Sec'y of Labor, Civ. No. 82-2315 (D.D.C. Feb. 6, 1995). The Department and the growers filed timely notices of appeal.

II

As a threshold matter, the plaintiffs challenge this court's jurisdiction to hear these appeals. This court has jurisdiction over appeals of "final decisions of the district courts." 28 U.S.C. § 1291. The plaintiffs argue, however, that the district court's February 6, 1995, dismissal of the case was not a "final decision" because the district court simultaneously remanded the case to the Department.

A remand order usually is not a final decision, Occidental Petroleum Corp. v. SEC, 873 F.2d...