Kuck v. Planet Home Lending, LLC
Kuck v. Planet Home Lending, LLC
Opinion of the Court
*164Presently before the Court is a motion by defendants Planet Home Lending, LLC and Michael Dubeck (the "Defendants"), pursuant to Local Civil Rule 6.3, seeking reconsideration of the Court's February 27, 2018 Order (the "Order") denying their January 8, 2018 motion to dismiss, ECF 28, the first amended complaint filed on November 20, 2017, ECF 26 (the "First Amended Complaint"), by plaintiffs Kenneth Kuck ("Kuck") and Anthony Juliano ("Juliano") (collectively, the "Plaintiffs") as moot, or, in the alternative, to dismiss the second amended complaint filed on January 10, 2018, ECF 29 (the "Second Amended Complaint").
For the following reasons, the Court reconsiders the Order, but nonetheless denies the Defendants' motion to dismiss.
I. BACKGROUND
A. THE RELEVANT FACTS
The Plaintiffs are former loan officers employed by the Defendants. ECF 29 ¶¶ 8-9, 17-18. They bring this action on behalf of themselves and other similarly situated loan officers alleging that the Defendants willfully denied them overtime compensation in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act ("FLSA"),
According to the Second Amended Complaint, the Plaintiffs' job duties (the origination of mortgage loans) required them to work in excess of 40 hours each workweek for the Defendants' benefit, ECF 29 at ¶¶ 9, 11-13, 18, 20-22, 27-28, including interacting with potential borrowers by telephone and email six days a week.
With respect to amount and frequency of his unpaid overtime worked, Kuck alleges as follows:
10. During his employment, Kuck worked six days a week.
11. During this time, Kuck worked Monday through Saturday for 10 hours each day with a meal break of a half hour.
12. During his employment, Kuck worked 50-55 hours each week.
ECF 29 at ¶¶ 10-12.
With respect to amount and frequency of his unpaid overtime worked, Juliano alleges as follows:
20. During his employment, Juliano worked at least five days a week and worked one or two Saturdays per month.
21. During this time, Juliano worked Monday through Friday for 11 hours each day with a meal break of a half hour. Juliano worked five hours on Saturday for one or two Saturdays per month.
*16522. During his employment, Juliano worked 50-55 hours each week.
B. PROCEDURAL BACKGROUND
On August 15, 2017, Kuck filed the initial complaint. ECF 1 (the "Initial Complaint").
On October 18, 2017, the Defendants moved to dismiss the Initial Complaint claiming that Kuck failed to allege sufficient facts to support his claims for unpaid overtime and because he signed a valid release waiving all state law claims against the Defendants. ECF 23.
On November 20, 2017, in lieu of responding to the motion to dismiss, Kuck and newlynamed Juliano filed the First Amended Complaint containing additional allegations and adding Juliano as a named plaintiff. ECF 26.
On January 4, 2018, the Defendants filed a second motion to dismiss Counts I and II of the Amended Complaint, arguing that the Amended Complaint still failed to allege sufficient facts to support their claims for unpaid overtime. ECF 28.
On January 10, 2018, the Plaintiffs filed the Second Amended Complaint, ECF 29, "[p]er the directives of the court clerk ... for the sole purpose of correcting a paragraph numbering error in their original Amended Complaint." ECF 29 n.1. "No substantive changes were made."
On January 18, 2018, the Plaintiffs filed their opposition to the Defendants' second motion to dismiss. ECF 32. The Defendants replied on January 25, 2018. ECF 35.
On February 28, 2018, the Court issued the Order denying the second motion to dismiss as moot. In issuing the Order, the Court stated: "it appears that the Plaintiff has addressed the Defendants' arguments contained in their motion to dismiss. Of course, this does not prevent the Defendants from filing a motion to dismiss the second amended complaint." February 28, 2018 Electronic Order.
On March 7, 2018, the Defendants filed the instant motion seeking reconsideration of the Order, or, in the alternative, dismissal of the Second Amended Complaint based on the papers submitted in favor of dismissing the First Amended Complaint.
II. DISCUSSION
A. THE MOTION FOR RECONSIDERATION
Local Civil Rule 6.3 permits a party to move for reconsideration of a court order within 14 days after the entry of the Court's determination of the original motion. "The standard for granting such a motion is strict, and reconsideration will generally be denied unless the moving party can point to controlling decisions or data that the court overlooked - matters, in other words, that might reasonably be expected to alter the conclusion reached by the court." Shrader v. CSX Transp., Inc. ,
The Court will reconsider the Order, because the court apparently overlooked the fact that the Second Amended Complaint only corrected clerical errors in the First Amended Complaint. To the extent that it expressed that the revisions in *166the Second Amended Complaint addressed the merits of the motion to dismiss the First Amended Complaint, the Court was incorrect. That being said, the Court now finds that the consequences of this misstatement were de minimis , considering that the Court granted the Defendants leave to seek dismissal of the Second Amended Complaint. With this in mind, the Court will treat the Defendants' January 18, 2018 motion to dismiss as a motion to dismiss the Second Amended Complaint on the merits.
B. THE MOTION TO DISMISS
1. The Legal Standard on a Motion to Dismiss
In considering a motion to dismiss pursuant to Fed.R.Civ.P. 12(b)(6), the Court generally " 'accept[s] all allegations in the complaint as true and draw all inferences in the nonmoving party's favor.' " LaFaro v. New York Cardiothoracic Grp., PLLC ,
2. Application
The FLSA "mandates that an employee engaged in interstate commerce be compensated at a rate of no less than one and one-half times the regular rate of pay for any hours worked in excess of forty per week." Nakahata v. New York-Presbyterian Healthcare Sys., Inc. ,
The resolution of this motion revolves around the proper interpretation of three inter-related Second Circuit decisions articulating the pleading standard in FLSA overtime cases, namely, Lundy v. Catholic Health System of Long Island Inc. ,
*167"Prior to the decision in Lundy , [the Second Circuit] had not considered the degree of specificity necessary to state an FLSA overtime claim." Nakahata ,
Very soon after Lundy , the Second Circuit revisited the issue in Nakahata , where the plaintiffs also alleged uncompensated work during meal breaks, training sessions, and extra shift time as evidence of an overtime violation without demonstrating how these instances added up to forty or more hours in a given week. Nakahata ,
Finally, in Dejesus , also decided in the same year, the Second Circuit expounded on its holdings in Lundy and Nakahata . It wrote that the Lundy plaintiffs failed to allege they worked uncompensated overtime, because the hours alleged by the plaintiffs fell short of adding up "to a claim that over forty hours had been worked in any particular week. The allegations in Lundy thus failed because of arithmetic: tallying the plausible factual allegations, [the Second Circuit] could not get beyond forty hours in any given week, and therefore to a plausible claim for overtime." Dejesus ,
Applying these principals, the Second Circuit affirmed the dismissal of the Dejesus complaint, since she "alleged only that in 'some or all weeks' she worked more than 'forty hours' a week without being paid '1.5' times her rate of compensation."
After reviewing this trio of decisions, the Court wholeheartedly concurs with the synthesis of the Second Circuit's holdings provided in Chime v. Peak Security Plus, Inc. ,
The most salient corollary from the Lundy - Nakahata - Dejesus triumvirate is that an FLSA plaintiff must provide a *168certain degree of specificity as to uncompensated hours worked during a particular week. This is reflected in the pivotal passages from each case. Lundy wrote that "a plaintiff must sufficiently allege 40 hours of work in a given workweek as well as some uncompensated time in excess of the 40 hours,"711 F.3d at 114 , and Nakahata provided that "absent any allegation that Plaintiffs were scheduled to work forty hours in a given week, these allegations do not state a plausible claim for such relief.... Plaintiffs must provide sufficient detail ... to support a reasonable inference that they worked more than forty hours in a given meek."723 F.3d at 201 . Dejesus explained that the claims in Lundy failed "because of arithmetic: tallying the plausible factual allegations, we could not get beyond forty hours in any given week,"726 F.3d at 88-89 , and the Nakahata complaint was deficient in that it lacked "any allegation that Plaintiffs were scheduled to work forty hours in a given week."Id. at 89 (quoting Nakahata ,723 F.3d at 201 ) (all emphases added).
With these principles in mind, the Court finds this case distinguishable from the allegations at issue in Lundy, Nakahata , and Dejesus . In those cases, the complaints lacked sufficient factual information for the court to determine that in a particular week the plaintiffs both worked more than 40 hours and the defendant failed to pay overtime wages. In Lundy and Nakahata , the plaintiffs alleged that they were scheduled to work 40 hours or less per week but exceeded the 40 hour threshold due to uncompensated work during breaks, training sessions, and additional shifts. Lundy ,
Here, the Plaintiffs are not merely claiming that they "occasionally," "typically," or "regularly" worked more than 40 hours in some weeks. Rather, the Second Amended Complaint alleges that the Plaintiffs worked 50-55 hours during every single week of their employment. ECF 29 ¶¶ 13, 22. From August 3, 2013 through July 22, 2017, Kuck worked 10 hours each day, with a half hour meal break, six days a week without receiving overtime compensation. Id. ¶¶ 6, 11-12. From October 13, 2014 through January 15, 2017, Juliano worked 11 hours a day, with a half hour meal break, each week, and one or two additional five-hour days per month without receiving overtime compensation. Id. ¶¶ 15, 20-21. In other words, the Second Amended Complaint claims that every week between August 3, 2013 and July 22, 2017, for Kuck, and every week between October 13, 2014 and January 15, 2017, for Juliano, constitutes a "given workweek" for which they are entitled to overtime pay.
These allegations clearly satisfy the Second Circuit's edict that a complaint contain specificity as to as to uncompensated hours worked during a particular week. See Smith v. Mercy Med. Ctr. , No. 16-cv-1814,
Further, the facts in this case are distinguishable from the cases string-cited by the Defendants, which dismissed claims based on mere generalizations of the amount of time worked. See Amponin v. Olayan Am. Corp. , No. 14-cv-2008,
The complaint in this case also differs from the cases which Defendants point to finding that mere repetitions of the statutory language, without any additional factual context about the number of hours worked, fails to state a claim. See Ayala v. Looks Great Servs., Inc. , No. 14-cv-6035,
Applying Lundy , Nakahata , and Dejesus as the Defendants suggest would produce an anomalous result. Plaintiffs would be unable to pursue claims for FLSA overtime violations based on allegations that their employer systematically denied them overtime pay over the course of their entire employment. The Second Circuit certainly could not have intended such an outcome, as it would deny relief to the plaintiffs most worthy of an FLSA claim. See Gayvoronskaya v. Americare, Inc. , No. 15-cv-6641,
Therefore, the Court denies the Defendants' motion to dismiss in its entirety.
III. CONCLUSION
For the foregoing reasons, the Court grants the Defendants motion to reconsider, and denies the motion to dismiss.
It is SO ORDERED .
Reference
- Full Case Name
- Kenneth KUCK, and Anthony Juliano, Individually, and on Behalf of All Others Similarly Situated v. PLANET HOME LENDING, LLC and Michael Dubeck
- Cited By
- 16 cases
- Status
- Published