Federal courts across the country have been split on the issue of whether a court can exercise personal jurisdiction over out-of-state plaintiffs who want to opt-in into a Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) collective action. The Eastern District of Pennsylvania just issued a ruling siding with those courts that have minimized the number of members in a collective action, ruling that it lacked specific jurisdiction over FLSA claims of out-of-state opt-in plaintiffs who were not harmed in Pennsylvania. The August 12 decision in Weirbach v. The Cellecular Connection, LLC, is an important one, as it provides added support to employers looking to break up a putative collective and reduce their potential legal exposure.
Facts And Legal Analysis
In Weirbach, the named plaintiffs alleged that their employer did not compensate them for “off the clock” work. Twenty-two other individuals joined the named plaintiffs in the lawsuit and filed a motion for conditional certification. Although the Pennsylvania district court conditionally certified the collective group of plaintiffs, it decided to narrow its scope to exclude out-of-state plaintiffs, concluding that a 2017 Supreme Court decision required such a move.
In Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. v. Superior Court of California, San Francisco Cty., the Supreme Court addressed the issue of whether a California state court could exercise specific jurisdiction over a pharmaceutical company where in-state and out-of-state plaintiffs raised products liability claims against the company. The Supreme Court determined that the California state court lacked jurisdiction over the company for the out-of-state plaintiffs’ claims, even though the out-of-state plaintiffs suffered the same harms as the plaintiffs within California.
Back to Weirbach, the Pennsylvania district court drew similarities between the mass action in the 2017 Supreme Court case and an FLSA collective action. It determined that FLSA opt-in plaintiffs were real parties in interest to the litigation, unlike a class action where a representative party proceeds on behalf of absent class members. For this reason, the court held that the plaintiffs would need to be from Pennsylvania in order to be entitled to relief from Pennsylvania courts.
The court also explained that limiting the territorial reach of a collective action was consistent with congressional intent, noting that the FLSA lacked a nationwide service of process provision. Meanwhile, the Clayton Act – which...
