A person holds several U.S. hundred-dollar bills.
SALEM, Ore. - A worker who filed a class action over improper deductions from employee paychecks lost the chance to win $200 for each paycheck after trial and appeals courts interpreted the phrase “a violation” to mean one pattern of making illegal deductions, not each time it happened.
In a case that drew support from the Oregon Trial Lawyers Association, Clarissa Win sued Blakeslee Vineyard Estate for withholding tips from employee paychecks. An Oregon statute allows employees to collect the greater of $200 or actual damages for “a violation” of labor laws. The law also requires courts to dismiss such class actions if the employer cures the violations within a certain amount of time.
Blakeslee notified class members of the violation and refunded the missing wages, so a trial court dismissed the class action. The plaintiff argued her case was still alive, however, since she was also seeking equitable relief in the form of a court-ordered accounting of the missing wages. The trial court denied her motion and dismissed the case.
The Oregon Court of Appeals upheld that dismissal in a Sept. 10 opinion by Judge Jacqueline Kamins. Oregon law allows defendants to dismiss a labor class action if they provide “the appropriate compensation, correction, or remedy of the alleged wrong.” Equitable relief wasn’t available, the appeals court said, since there is no “partnership or other type of relationship” allowing for such an order.
The trial court also rejected the argument that the law allowed for $200 per improper paycheck. (The Oregon Trial Lawyers Association would have gone further, urging the court to read the law as allowing damages of $200 for each improper deduction in each paycheck.)
The private right of action was added to the labor statute 1980 after lawmakers remarked that the previous enforcement mechanism, criminal prosecution, had never been used. The statute specifies the greater of $200 or actual damages for “a violation.” The plaintiff argued the word “a” meant every instance labor law was violated, while the defendant said that interpretation would improperly replace “a” with “each.”
The linguistic jousting doesn’t matter, the appeals court said. A federal court looking at the same phrase concluded either interpretation made sense but the legislature could have used the plural “violations” if it meant each instance the law was broken. The prior criminal law also provided a fine of up to $100 for “each offense,” language the legislature dropped in the 1980 version. A separate law prohibiting employers from requiring workers to falsify time records still states “each violation,” the appeals court noted.
Finally, legislators modified the language during debates to satisfy critics who worried the bill would enrich trial lawyers and impose unnecessary costs on small employers. “There are many small employers, small persons, small corporations, partnerships that can get zinged by this,” one lawmaker said at the time.
“It would be incongruent with the legislature’s concern over minimizing the cost for employers to construe the $200 statutory damage—a much larger value in 1979 than today—as one that stacks each time the same violation occurs,” the appeals court said.
Chief Judge Erin Legesen dissented, writing: “Regardless of the various meanings of the indefinite article ‘a,’ the word refers to a single thing, in this instance, a single violation.”
