Caicedo v. The Anthem Companies, Inc.

Background

Eugenia Caicedo sued The Anthem Companies, Inc., alleging violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), New York Labor Law, New York State Human Rights Law, and New York City Human Rights Law. She also brought an individual claim under the Family and Medical Leave Act. The opinion addressed her motion for conditional certification of an FLSA collective action.

Caicedo alleged that Anthem required her and other sales employees to work more than 40 hours per week without overtime pay and improperly classified several categories of employees as exempt outside salespeople. Her theory was that employees worked from home, which she argued was a fixed place of work and therefore inconsistent with the outside-sales exemption. She sought to represent non-managerial Anthem employees in New York who held various job titles, including retention associates, facilitated enrollers, Medicaid representatives, customer service representatives, sales representatives, field sales representatives, and inside sales representatives.

Anthem had informed the court about related litigation in Indiana involving alleged misclassification of Anthem employees. The court ordered Caicedo to explain why this case should not be stayed pending that related case.

Stay request

The court declined to stay the case. Although the two cases overlapped because both involved alleged misclassification of Anthem employees in New York and alleged lost overtime pay, they did not cover the same employees or periods. The proposed collective in this case included certain employees who worked after June 2018, while the Indiana case concerned employees who worked after March 1, 2020. Caicedo herself would not have been included in the Indiana case because she did not work for Anthem after March 1, 2020. The court also noted that this case was filed first and that the alleged employment practices and evidence were centered in New York.

Conditional-certification standard

Under Section 216(b) of the FLSA, employees may sue on behalf of themselves and other employees who are similarly situated. At the initial notice stage, a plaintiff must make a modest factual showing that the plaintiff and potential participants were victims of a common policy or plan that violated the law. The court emphasized that this burden is low but not nonexistent, and unsupported assertions are insufficient. At this stage, the court does not decide whether an actual FLSA violation occurred.

Court’s analysis

The court held that Caicedo did not meet the notice-stage burden. Her motion gave almost no facts about the duties, hours, or workplaces of employees outside her own job category. She relied mainly on her own experience as a sales representative while seeking to include employees in multiple different job categories.

Caicedo did not provide facts showing that proposed collective members regularly worked from home. Her declaration stated that she and other sales employees conducted most sales activities from home offices, but the court found that statement unsupported. She also relied on conversations with four other employees, but gave few details about when or where those conversations occurred and did not establish how often or how long the employees worked from home. The court said that conversations or observations, without more, did not show that other employees were similarly situated.

The court found that a declaration from a plaintiff in the related Indiana litigation added little because it concerned Indiana employees outside the proposed New York collective and focused largely on work conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic. The court also found that Anthem’s wage and policy manual merely described general overtime procedures and did not identify a common unlawful policy. A similar job description, by itself, likewise did not establish that employees were similarly situated or subject to the same allegedly unlawful practice.

Disposition

The court declined to stay the case and denied Caicedo’s motion for collective certification. It denied as moot her requests for discovery of the names and contact information of potential collective members, approval of a proposed notice, and tolling of the statute of limitations. The court stated that Caicedo would not be given leave to try collective certification again. The case was not dismissed in the opinion; the court set fact-discovery, expert-discovery, and pretrial-conference deadlines.