Following a growing trend among courts in FLSA collective actions, a federal judge in the District of Columbia refused to certify a broad group of employees asserting claims in connection with an automatic meal break deduction policy. In Dinkel v. Medstar Health, Inc., the plaintiffs, who worked at one of the nine hospitals within Medstar Health’s network, sought to certify a class of all employees subject to automatic meal break deductions at all nine Medstar Health hospitals. The plaintiffs claimed that the auto-deduct policy, which allowed employees to request payment for missed meal breaks, “was coupled with a common practice of imposing limitations on, discouraging, and ignoring efforts to recover pay for missed meal breaks.”

After denying conditional certification as to two of the hospitals that didn’t even have an auto-deduct policy, the court turned its attention to the remaining seven hospitals in plaintiffs’ proposed collective action. Significantly, the court pointed out that the use of an auto-deduct policy was not itself unlawful, and therefore an employer policy providing automatic deduction of meal breaks “does not constitute a unified policy of FLSA violations capable of binding together a collective action.”    

As to the alleged “common practice” of limiting, discouraging, and ignoring employees’ efforts to recover pay for missed meal breaks, the court found that there was no evidence that there was any such practice other than the plaintiffs’ assertions regarding just two departments in which they had worked in one of hospitals. Thus, the court determined that there was no basis to conclude that the plaintiffs were similarly situated to any other employees outside of those two departments and conditionally certified only a group of employees who worked in the same hospital, and in the same two departments, as the plaintiffs. 

Another significant aspect of the case is the court’s analysis of whether the proposed collective action would be manageable. Citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Dukes, the court concluded that it could “not turn a blind eye to the fact that [plaintiffs’ claims] will ultimately turn on the way in which individual supervisors and managers exercised their discretion to manage employees’ meal breaks. . . .  The court would therefore be left to make individualized determinations for each party-plaintiff.” Under these circumstances, the court concluded that the broad proposed case was both ineligible and unsuitable for conditional certification.

The D.C. federal district court’s recognition of the applicability of the principles underlying Dukes to certification decisions in FLSA collective actions is heartening. The case provides welcome support for the argument that in an FLSA collective action, as in a discrimination class action such as Dukes, where supervisory discretion is at issue, individualized determinations will have to be made, rendering the case unmanageable and unsuitable for collective treatment, unless it is limited to a very small group reporting to one or two managers.

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