David Ojeda-Sanchez v. Carmelo Hernandez-Rubio

499 F. App'x 897
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit
DecidedNovember 29, 2012
Docket11-13835
StatusUnpublished
Cited by6 cases

This text of 499 F. App'x 897 (David Ojeda-Sanchez v. Carmelo Hernandez-Rubio) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
David Ojeda-Sanchez v. Carmelo Hernandez-Rubio, 499 F. App'x 897 (11th Cir. 2012).

Opinions

HILL, Circuit Judge:

Plaintiffs/Appellants are Mexican seasonal farmworkers. They sued Bland Farms, LLC, asserting violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act and breach of contract. Following an eight day bench trial, the district court found a violation but in an amount less than claimed. Additionally, the district court rejected the workers’ claim for liquidated damages, refused to enlarge the limitations period and denied the workers leave to amend to add twenty-one additional workers. The workers appeal these adverse rulings.

I.

The appellants are Mexican seasonal farmworkers (the “Farmworkers”) who work for Bland Farms, LLC (“Bland”) as guest workers pursuant to the H-2A program. Bland employed the workers during the 2004-2008 seasons to plant and harvest onions. Bland employs field supervisors who record the time and amount of onions planted or harvested by the Farmworkers. Bland also employs “field walkers” who help supervise the Farm-workers and otherwise assist the supervisors. Some of the field walkers are also paid to drive a crew bus to and from the fields. The employment relationships between the workers and Bland are governed by the Fair Labor Standards Act (the “FLSA”) as well as by contractual agreements found in H-2A clearance orders that Bland filed with the Department of Labor (the “DOL”).

Farmworkers central claim is that Bland’s supervisors did not accurately record Farmworkers’ work hours and, as a result, significantly underpaid them. Farmworkers claim that Bland’s inaccurate record-keeping was willful and undertaken in bad faith. The district court agreed that Bland’s records contained inaccuracies, but awarded Farmworkers substantially less additional work time than they had claimed. Additionally, the district court found that Bland’s FLSA violation was not willful and its conduct not in bad faith. Farmworkers appeal these holdings.

II.

1. The Wage Claims

Farmworkers claim an average deficiency in recorded hours of approximately 2.4 hours per day, per worker. Although they initially sought to prove that Bland deliberately forged pay records as part of a scheme to systematically underpay the workers, Farmworkers abandoned this claim midway through the bench trial when the evidence failed to support that claim.1

At trial, Bland’s field supervisors admitted to numerous shortcuts, omissions, and estimates in their time-keeping records. As Farmworkers’ counsel put it, “apprehension of the rules by [Bland’s supervisors] had the effect of producing under-counting [of hours]. It is not because they [900]*900are bad people. It is just that they had an apprehension that we think is inconsistent with the law.”

The evidence was that, on many mornings, Farmworkers began the day sitting on the buses at the fields awaiting word that the fields were dry enough to begin work. Bland’s field supervisors did not begin counting Farmworkers’ work time upon arrival at the fields, but instead waited until Farmworkers actually began planting or harvesting onions. The supervisors also excluded lunch time and the time that Farmworkers spent waiting for the buses to takes them home or for the field supervisor to tally each group’s production. Stop times were sometimes altered at the end of the day to compensate for unrecorded breaks Farmworkers took throughout the day. As a result of these practices, the district court concluded that Farmworkers established that Bland’s pay records were inaccurate as to the start and end of work each day and that they were due additional compensation.2

Under Anderson v. Mt. Clemens Pottery, Co., 328 U.S. 680, 66 S.Ct. 1187, 90 L.Ed. 1515 (1946), the Farmworkers had two avenues open to them to establish the amount of work for which they were un-dercompensated. First, they could provide the court with “convincing substitutes” for Bland’s records, which would show the correct amount of time they worked. Farmworkers argued that the court should use the hours recorded for bus drivers who also served as field walkers.3 They argued that since the bus drivers transported the Farmworkers to the fields in the morning, walked the fields all day, and then drove the busses home at night, their hours recorded for walking the fields were a convincing substitute for the inaccurate Farmworker time records.4

The court rejected these records as a convincing substitute because the bus drivers/field walkers had additional duties requiring additional work time beyond the time the Farmworkers were in the fields.5 The evidence supported this finding of fact and, therefore, it is not clearly erroneous.6

The second avenue open to the Farm-workers under Mt. Clemens is to “produce sufficient evidence to show the amount and extent of that [uncompensated] work as a matter of just and reasonable inference.” 828 U.S. at 688, 66 S.Ct. 1187. The district court found that the evidence established, and Bland did not deny, that Bland “did not begin counting the Plaintiffs’ time when they arrived at the fields, stopped counting before Plaintiffs left, and arbitrarily deducted time for unrecorded breaks they thought Plaintiffs took throughout the day. Many of these breaks [901]*901were likely fully compensable.” As a result, the court held that Farmworkers had produced sufficient evidence from which the court could reasonably infer that they had worked some time for which they were not compensated.

In calculating how much uncompensated time could reasonably be inferred from the credible evidence, the district court concluded, based upon the testimony regarding the Farmworkers’ time of arrival at the fields and occasional time spent sitting on busses or waiting for busses at the end of the day, that it was reasonable to infer that each worker was due an extra 30 minutes of compensable time per week.7

The Farmworkers dispute this finding. They argue that since Bland was unable to negate the inference that the workers were due some extra compensation or to produce evidence of the precise amount of work performed by them, that they are entitled, as a matter of law, to the 2.4 extra hours they claimed and for which they provided supporting testimony and their own personally recorded time sheets.8 We disagree.

Farmworkers misunderstand the Mt. Clemens standard. In the absence of convincing substitutes for Bland’s faulty records, the district court was obligated under Mt. Clemens to award damages to Farm-workers based on “whatever reasonable inferences can be drawn from the employee’s evidence.... ” 328 U.S. at 693, 66 S.Ct. 1187. But where the employer produces evidence “to negative the reasonableness of the inference to be drawn from the employees’ evidence,” id. at 688, 66 S.Ct. 1187, the district court is not relieved of its responsibility as the finder of fact to weigh the evidence, assess the credibility of the witnesses, and evaluate the reasonableness of the permissible inferences. We express no opinion on what course would be required of the district court in the absence of such employer evidence because that is not this case.

In this case, Bland did produce substantial evidence tending to negate the 2.4 hours claimed by Farmworkers.

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499 F. App'x 897, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/david-ojeda-sanchez-v-carmelo-hernandez-rubio-ca11-2012.