Court decisions resolving FLSA conditional certification motions are relatively commonplace. However, far fewer decisions are available addressing FLSA class certification at the post-discovery stage of litigation. These decisions usually arise in response to the defendant’s motion to “decertify” the FLSA class.
I recently wrote a brief responding to a decertification motion. In the process, I came across four decisions in which federal courts in Pennsylvania have refused to decertify the FLSA class. These decisions are briefly discussed below:
In Lockhart v. Westinghouse Credit Corp., 879 F.2d 43 (3d Cir. 1989), the Third Circuit applied 216(b)’s “similarly situated” requirement to an ADEA claim alleging that workers were discriminatorily terminated from their jobs. Id. at 46. The individual class members were “from different divisions of the company” and “different areas of the country” and “reported to different managers,” id. at 61 (Garth, J., dissenting), so, in opposing collective treatment, the company emphasized the “individualized explanations” for each plaintiff’s termination, id. at 62.