A federal court in Nebraska has denied Werner Enterprises’ offer to dismiss another wage lawsuit alleging the learner drivers are underpaid.
In early June, Nebraska District Court Judge Brian Buescher dismissed Werner’s motion to dismiss a class action lawsuit. In November, former intern Cynthia Rogers filed a lawsuit alleging the company violated both federal and state wage laws.
Rogers began her career as a truck driver by enrolling at the Werner-run Drivers Management training school. Typically for road transport, the trainees essentially lived in their trucks for a week while they swapped driving tasks with their instructors. According to the complaint, the trainees should be “responsible for the tractor units and their contents assigned to them 24 hours a day”.
Plaintiffs argue that the only part of the 24 hours that is non-refundable is the eight-hour rest period. So Werner was responsible for paying the drivers for the remaining 16 hours, which he didn’t. However, since drivers were not allowed to “pursue private and personal pursuits” during the eight-hour rest period, the lawsuit argues that Werner has to pay them for the full 24 hours of a given day on the road.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because Werner faced a similar process not so long ago.
In June 2020, a federal appeals court overturned a Nebraska district court ruling awarding former Werner trainees nearly $ 800,000 in unpaid wages. That lawsuit went on for nearly a decade.
In his attempt to dismiss Rogers’ case, Werner argued that she and other interns in the class action lawsuit were prevented from making essentially the same claims. The legal principle of “res judicata” prevents a lawsuit from being heard again if a court has already settled the matter. However, this doctrine only applies to the same parties to the dispute. Rogers argued that she was not involved in the earlier lawsuit.
Judge Buescher stated in his ruling that “it is established that for a class action for monetary damages that binds an absent class member, the member must ‘receive notification and be given the opportunity to be heard and participate in the litigation.'” Werner does not claim that Rogers was properly informed of the trainee’s previous class action lawsuit. Indeed, Werner admitted that Rogers “did not work for Werner until the judgment was received”.
Furthermore, even if Rogers had qualified as a member of the group, she would have had the option to self-exclude in order to pursue her own lawsuit. For obvious reasons, she didn’t have that opportunity.
“Given that Rogers could have excluded her claims if she had been a member of the (previous) class, it makes little sense to this court that she should now be prevented from making her claims as someone who the time of the (previous) lawsuit was not even employed by (Werner). ” LL
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