Vaquero v. Ashley Furniture: 9th Cir. Ruling Clarifies, Eases Class Certification Requirements

In June, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling that could provide a significant boon to class action plaintiffs. In Vaquero v. Ashley Furniture Industries, Inc., et al. (9th Cir. June 8, 2016) (slip op. available here), the appellate panel affirmed a district court order granting certification in a wage and hour class action. In doing so, the court considered the applicability of several United States Supreme Court opinions from recent years, finding in favor of the Vaquero plaintiffs in each instance.

The Vaquero plaintiffs were commission-only salespeople who alleged that they were required to perform additional, non-sales work without being paid the requisite minimum wage for these tasks. The lower court certified the class, and the defendant-employer appealed, citing landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes (564 U.S. 338 (2011)) and Comcast Corp. v. Behrend (133 S. Ct. 1426 (2013)), neither of which involved wage and hour issues.

Examining the commonality requirement, which requires that plaintiffs’ claims be capable of classwide resolution, the Ninth Circuit rejected the defendants’ reliance on Dukes. The appeals court distinguished Dukes from Vaquero, pointing out that the former was a Title VII discrimination case involving millions of employees and innumerable managerial decisions across thousands of store locations, while the present case has a proposed class of 600 employees who perform the same work, and whose injury is focused and objective as compared to Dukes. Thus, the Ninth Circuit in Vaquero limited the impact of Dukes on wage and hour commonality analyses.

As for the predominance requirement (that issues of law and fact predominate over individual issues), the court again shot down the defendants’ reasoning, this time with regard to Comcast, a consumer antitrust class action where the Supreme Court found a lack of predominance because the plaintiffs used a faulty damages model and were unable to demonstrate that their damages could be determined on a classwide basis. The panel concluded that the defendants’ interpretation of Comcast—that predominance cannot be found unless damages can be determined on a classwide basis—was too broad, and instead held that the plaintiffs need only “prove that damages resulted from the defendant’s conduct” in order to prevail. Slip op. at 8. Here, there was no doubt that the class members’ injuries had been caused by the employer’s conduct, unlike in the much more attenuated context of an antitrust action in Comcast. Id. at 9.

Finally, Vaquero references the recent Supreme Court decision in Tyson Foods v. Bouaphakeo, 136 S. Ct. 1036 (2016) (finding that representative evidence can be used to show both damages and liability) (previously covered on the ILJ here), noting that: “[t]he Supreme Court has not disturbed our precedent” and “the need for individual damages calculations does not, alone, defeat class certification.” Slip op. at 10. The Vaquero ruling not only paves the way for certification of this class of 600 Ashley Furniture employees, but will no doubt be helpful to many more California employees in the future.

Authored by: 
Robin Hall, Associate
CAPSTONE LAW APC