Weatherly v. Ford Motor Co.

994 F.3d 940

Malik WEATHERLY, Plaintiff - Appellant

v.FORD MOTOR COMPANY, Defendant - Appellee

No. 20-1771

United States Court of Appeals, Eighth Circuit.

Submitted: February 16, 2021

Filed: April 19, 2021

Megan Lowe Stiles, Joshua Paul Wunderlich, CORNERSTONE LAW FIRM, Kansas City, MO, for Plaintiff - Appellant.

Kirti Datla, Jessica Lynn Ellsworth, HOGAN & LOVELLS, Washington, DC, Timothy Scott Millman, BERKOWITZ & OLIVER, Kansas City, MO, for Defendant - Appellee.

Before SMITH, Chief Judge, ARNOLD and STRAS, Circuit Judges.

ARNOLD, Circuit Judge.

After Ford Motor Company fired Malik Weatherly, an assembly-line worker at one of its plants, Weatherly sued, asserting that Ford had terminated him (twice), and had taken other adverse employment action against him, because of his asthma and scoliosis. He laid claims under the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Missouri Human Rights Act. The district court dismissed Weatherly's FMLA claims as time-barred, and it dismissed his ADA and MHRA claims on the ground that he had failed to exhaust his administrative remedies. Weatherly appeals these dismissals, and we affirm in part and reverse in part.

At this stage of the case, we accept as true the facts alleged in the complaint. See Blomker v. Jewell , 831 F.3d 1051, 1055 (8th Cir. 2016). For about the first year and a half of Weatherly's employ, Ford excused him from working on days when he suffered from asthma complications. But about a week after Weatherly submitted paperwork to Ford seeking intermittent FMLA leave, he was suspended for thirty days because, according to Ford, Weatherly had missed too much work. Less than a year later, after Weatherly missed work for asthma complications, Ford terminated him.

Weatherly filed charges with the Missouri Commission on Human Rights and with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and a few months later Ford rehired him but put him in a new position that was more physically demanding. Weatherly informed his supervisor that his new duties aggravated his scoliosis, and when he arrived to work one day with doctor-recommended physical restrictions, Ford terminated him once again. As a result, Weatherly filed another administrative charge with the MCHR and the EEOC.

We begin with the court's dismissal of Weatherly's FMLA claims. The FMLA allows eligible employees to take up to twelve weeks of unpaid leave during a twelve-month period to deal with a serious health condition. See Garrison v. Dolgencorp, LLC , 939 F.3d 937, 944 (8th Cir. 2019) ; see also 29 U.S.C. § 2612(a)(1)(D). In his amended complaint, Weatherly claimed that Ford interfered with his FMLA rights when it suspended him and that it suspended him in retaliation for his asking about and requesting FMLA leave. See 29 U.S.C. § 2615(a). The statute of limitations for FMLA claims is two years for ordinary violations and three years for willful ones. See id. § 2617(c)(1)–(2). A violation is willful if "the employer either knew or showed reckless disregard for the matter of whether its conduct was prohibited by the statute." See Hanger v. Lake Cty. , 390 F.3d 579, 583 (8th Cir. 2004). Because Weatherly did not bring suit until about a month after the second anniversary of the suspension in question, these FMLA claims are barred unless the alleged violations were willful.

The district court held that Weatherly filed his claims too late. It pointed out that, though he alleged that Ford acted willfully in other parts of the complaint, he did not allege willfulness with respect to these FMLA claims. On appeal, Weatherly maintains that, while he did not plead willfulness specifically, the court "ignored reasonable inferences supported by the facts alleged" that Ford willfully violated the FMLA. Weatherly relies most heavily on allegations in his complaint that "Ford failed to make good faith efforts to establish and enforce policies to address and prevent illegal discrimination against its employees" and that "Ford failed to properly train or otherwise inform its supervisors and employees concerning their duties and obligations under the laws, including the FMLA." As a result, he says, "[i]t is not apparent from the face of [the] Complaint that his FMLA claims are time barred." Ford responds that these allegations demonstrate at most that Ford acted negligently, not willfully, and so the two-year limitations period applies.

We think that Weatherly's allegations are sufficient to support a claim, which is all he must show to survive a Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss. FMLA claims like those Weatherly asserts do not depend on whether a defendant acted willfully because a defendant's willfulness is not an element of the claim. A defendant may, of course, raise the applicable statute of limitations as an affirmative defense, see Fed. R. Civ. P. 8(c)(1), and it is true that courts may sometimes dismiss claims properly under Rule 12(b)(6) "as barred by a statute of limitations if the complaint itself shows that the claim is time-barred." See Wong v. Wells Fargo Bank N.A. , 789 F.3d 889, 897 (8th Cir. 2015). But it is also true that, in general, a defendant cannot render a complaint defective by pleading an affirmative defense, and so the possible existence of a limitations defense "is not ordinarily a ground for Rule 12(b)(6) dismissal unless the complaint itself establishes the defense." See Jessie v. Potter , 516 F.3d 709, 713 n.2 (8th Cir. 2008).

So the relevant question is how a complaint might establish a limitations defense. Ford invokes Crugher v. Prelesnik , 761 F.3d 610 (6th Cir. 2014), which similarly involved an FMLA claim filed more than two years but less than three years after the claim accrued. In that case, the court rejected the argument that the plaintiff had alleged a willful FMLA violation because the allegations in the complaint were insufficient to "make the state-of-mind allegation ‘plausible on its face,’ " id. at 617, a pleading standard for gauging the sufficiency of a complaint that the Supreme Court introduced in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly , 550 U.S. 544, 570, 127 S.Ct. 1955, 167 L.Ed.2d 929 (2007) and Ashcroft v. Iqbal , 556 U.S. 662, 678, 129 S.Ct. 1937, 173 L.Ed.2d 868 (2009). It's unclear whether the parties or the court ever questioned whether Twombly and Iqbal supply the standard governing the sufficiency of an allegation relating to an affirmative defense and not to the substance of a claim.

Other cases are more illuminating and persuasive than Crugher . For example, in Fernandez v. Clean House, LLC , 883 F.3d 1296 (10th Cir. 2018), a plaintiff brought a claim under the Fair Labor Standards Act, a statute that has a two-tiered limitations scheme identical to the one in the FMLA—the limitations period for ordinary violations is two years and for willful ones it is three years. See id. at 1298 ; see also 29 U.S.C. § 255(a). The plaintiffs' claims accrued more than two years but less than three years before they filed suit. Fernandez , 883 F.3d at 1298. The district court dismissed the claims on the ground that the plaintiffs had not supported their allegations of willfulness with sufficiently specific facts. See id.

The Tenth Circuit reversed. It explained that the district court and the defendants had "fail[ed] to recognize that willfulness is not relevant to the elements of Plaintiffs' claims but only to the statute-of-limitations defense," and under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, it is the defendant's responsibility to raise and prove that matter, not the plaintiff's responsibility to refute it in his complaint. The court held that plaintiffs do not need to anticipate in the complaint that a defendant might raise a particular affirmative defense, and what's more plaintiffs need not even respond to an answer raising such a defense with additional pleadings. While it recognized that it may be proper on occasion to dismiss a claim on the pleadings based on an affirmative defense, the court said that was appropriate "only when the complaint itself admits all the elements of the affirmative defense by alleging the factual basis for those elements." In other words, the complaint would have to admit that the violations were not willful; it wasn't enough that it did not plead facts sufficient to show that it was willful. Id. at 1298–99. In sum, the defendant would have to wait until summary judgment to press the defense.

In Xechem, Inc. v. Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. , Judge Easterbrook, writing for the court, likewise held that "plaintiffs need not anticipate and attempt to plead around all potential defenses," and so "[c]omplaints need not contain any information about defenses and may not be dismissed for that omission." 372 F.3d 899, 901 (7th Cir. 2004) (emphasis in original); see also Gomez v. Toledo , 446 U.S. 635, 640, 100 S.Ct. 1920, 64 L.Ed.2d 572 (1980). Instead, it's "[o]nly when the plaintiff pleads itself out of court—that is, admits all the ingredients of an impenetrable defense—may a complaint that otherwise states a claim be dismissed under Rule 12(b)(6)." Xechem, Inc. , 372 F.3d at 901. That court has doubled down on this view after Twombly and Iqbal , noting that neither decision scrapped the rule that complaints need not anticipate affirmative defenses. See Levin v. Miller , 763 F.3d 667, 671 (7th Cir. 2014).

The Tenth and Seventh Circuits' cases are more persuasive. It may well be that Weatherly's allegations of willfulness (or more accurately the allegations from which Weatherly thinks willfulness may be inferred) do not plausibly assert that Ford committed willful FMLA violations. But we need not reach that question. The important thing is that Weatherly's complaint does not plead him out of court by establishing that the alleged violations were not willful. The complaint leaves ample ground from which proof of willfulness may grow; there may be evidence that Ford's failure to establish and enforce certain policies or perform certain...