By design, the Class Action Fairness Act (CAFA) allows defendants to remove complex class actions to federal court. It avoids the onerous diversity requirements that defendants previously struggled to satisfy, and its $5 million amount-in-controversy threshold is often easy to meet in large class actions. In response, plaintiffs have often thrown up roadblocks to removal
On Dec. 24, 2024, Mexico published amendments to its Federal Labor Law regarding digital platforms. These changes take effect 180 days after publication.
This GT Alert highlights significant modifications to the law and details the new definitions, penalties, and implementation timelines.
2024 has seen increased class and collective actions brought by New York golf club caddies under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and the New York Labor Law (NYLL). The caddies claim they are misclassified employees of the golf clubs they work at and, as such, have not been properly paid wages under federal
With substantial union backing, California’s controversial Fast Food Accountability and Standards Recovery Act, A.B. 257 or the FAST Act, moved through California’s Legislature with relative ease.
As the president of the Service Employees International Union, Mary Kay Henry, told Bloomberg News, the bill effectively offers “another form of collective bargaining” for fast food workers.
On July 26, 2022, in a win for employers, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals issued a precedential opinion in Christa Fischer, et al. v. Federal Express Corp., et al, No. 21-1683, affirming a decision from the Eastern District of Pennsylvania that refused to allow two opt-in plaintiffs to join a putative collective action
In Estrada v. Royalty Carpet Mills, Inc., 76 Cal. App. 5th 685 (2022), the California Court of Appeal, in relevant part, reversed a trial court’s order decertifying a subclass and dismissing related Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA) claims as unmanageable. In doing so, the court held “a court cannot strike a PAGA claim based
In Waters v. Day & Zimmerman NPS, Inc., the First Circuit has seemingly muddied the waters on Bristol-Myers Squibb’s applicability to FLSA collective actions.
In 2017, the Supreme Court decided Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. v. Superior Court of California, addressing due process concerns related to personal jurisdiction in the context of an action where the vast majority of plaintiffs were residents of states outside the jurisdiction where the plaintiffs filed the lawsuit. Bristol-Myers involved 678 individual product liability claims
Employers have faced a tidal wave of Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) collective action litigation in the last 15 years, fueled in large part by courts that have made it easy for plaintiffs to quickly obtain “conditional certification,” under a “lenient” standard that results in a grant in the large majority of cases. If the
Mark D. Kemple, co-chair of global law firm Greenberg Traurig, LLP’s Labor & Employment Class and Collective Action Practice and leader of the Southern California Labor & Employment Practice, has been named a 2019 Employment Law Trailblazer by the National Law Journal.
The Employment Law Trailblazer award recognizes legal professionals who “make