Silloway v. City and County of San Francisco

Background

The plaintiffs are staff nurses employed by the City and County of San Francisco at public health facilities. The nurses who joined the collective action worked both regular staff-nurse shifts and voluntary per-diem shifts. The plaintiffs claimed that the City violated the Fair Labor Standards Act by paying per-diem shifts at 125% of the nurses’ implied hourly rate rather than paying time-and-a-half when those shifts caused them to work more than 40 hours in a week.

The City invoked the Fair Labor Standards Act’s exemption for employees employed in a bona fide professional capacity. The parties agreed that the nurses’ primary duties satisfied the professional-work requirement. The dispute concerned the salary-basis requirement: whether the nurses actually received a predetermined salary and whether the City guaranteed them the opportunity to work the hours corresponding to their full-time-equivalent status.

The Ninth Circuit had previously reversed an earlier grant of summary judgment for the City and sent the case back for further proceedings. It identified factual questions about payroll periods in which nurses were credited with fewer hours than their full-time-equivalent schedules. The district court considered updated payroll analyses after additional discovery.

Motions to Exclude Payroll Analyses

Both sides asked the court to exclude the other side’s payroll analysis under Federal Rule of Evidence 702, which governs expert testimony. The court concluded that the analyses did not require scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge. Instead, the witnesses organized payroll information and summarized the results.

The court therefore treated the analyses as summaries under Rule 1006, a rule permitting charts or calculations that summarize voluminous records that cannot conveniently be examined in court. The court found that both analyses accurately summarized the records they purported to cover and that neither side showed computational errors making either summary inaccurate. The court denied both cross motions to exclude. The court explained that the denial did not require the jury to accept either analysis; the parties could still challenge the witnesses’ methods and the significance of their results.

Cross Motions for Summary Judgment

The City argued that its updated payroll analysis explained the discrepancies identified by the Ninth Circuit and showed that any shortfalls resulted from nurses taking unpaid leave. The court found that the updated analysis did not resolve the factual dispute. It omitted six previously identified shortfall periods, and some of its explanations were based on assumptions about deposition testimony or the use of hours in surrounding pay periods. The court also concluded that deductions attributed to daylight-saving-time changes were not permitted under the regulation allowing public employers to make partial-day deductions for certain personal absences, illness, or injury.

The City separately argued that the nurses could not prove damages without an expert report. The court rejected that argument, finding that the relevant inputs—such as the number of nurses, overtime hours, and pay rates—could be drawn from the payroll records or other trial evidence and could be calculated with basic arithmetic.

The nurses relied on their payroll analysis, which identified periods in which nurses were paid for fewer hours than their full-time-equivalent schedules. The court found that the analysis raised an inference of improper deductions but did not resolve why the shortfalls occurred. The City presented evidence, including deposition testimony, that created competing inferences about whether nurses had been denied the opportunity to work their scheduled hours. Because a jury would need to assess the evidence and witness credibility, the court denied the nurses’ motion for summary judgment as well.

Collective-Action Decertification

The City asked the court to decertify the collective action and require the participating nurses to pursue their claims individually. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, employees may proceed together when they are similarly situated in ways that matter to resolving their claims.

The court denied decertification. It found that the nurses challenged the same generally applicable policy: the City’s decision not to pay time-and-a-half overtime when dual-status nurses worked more than 40 hours in a week. The court reasoned that the City had chosen to defend the case by relying on the salary-basis exemption rather than disputing that it maintained a uniform no-overtime policy. The court also found that individualized payroll evidence could help the jury determine whether the City maintained a broader compensation policy that failed the salary-basis test.

The court acknowledged that an actual practice of improper deductions does not automatically eliminate the exemption for every employee. But it found that limitation less significant here because the plaintiffs alleged a universal policy and the City had not conclusively shown that any improper deductions resulted from the discretionary actions of particular managers. The court concluded that the nurses had carried their burden to show that the case remained suitable for collective treatment.

Disposition

The court denied the parties’ cross motions for summary judgment, denied the parties’ cross motions to exclude expert testimony under Rule 702, and denied the City’s motion to decertify the collective action. The parties were ordered to attend a trial-setting conference by video on January 22, 2026, at 10:00 a.m.