The Ninth, Sixth, and Third Circuits all recently issued decisions about whether putative class or collective actions could proceed despite the existence of arbitration clauses.  In two of those decisions, the courts found the arbitration agreements did not allow for class arbitration and therefore dismissed the claims.  In the third, the court found the arbitration agreement was not applicable to the dispute.

In Opalinski v. Robert Half Int’l, 2017 WL 395968 (3d Cir. filed Jan. 30, 2017), the Third Circuit again tackled arbitrability issues in a case that has gotten the runaround for five years (district court, then arbitrator, then district court, then appellate court, back to district court, now back to appellate court).  The case involves a collective action complaint alleging violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act.  The arbitration clause between the employees and employer provides for AAA arbitration.  In its most recent decision, the district court dismissed the action, finding the arbitration clause did not allow class arbitration.  On appeal, the Third Circuit reiterated that courts (not arbitrators) should decide whether class arbitration is available.  It found that in this case the parties’ arbitration clause does not indicate they agreed to class arbitration.  In particular, the court found the absence of any explicit mention of class arbitration was dispositive, and outweighed the fact that the parties agreed to arbitrate disputes arising under statutes that allow class litigation.

In another employment dispute, Poublon v. C.H. Robinson Co., 2017 Wl 461099 (9th Cir. Feb. 3, 2017), a class of employees asserted that the employer had misclassified them as exempt from overtime pay and asserted a Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA) claim.  The arbitration agreement provided “neither You nor the Company may bring any Claim combined with or on behalf of any other person or entity, whether on a collective, representative, or class action basis.” It ended with a severability clause, so that if any part of the arbitration agreement was invalid, the rest of it would be enforced.  The employer moved to compel arbitration and dismiss class or representative claims.  The district court found the arbitration clause was unconscionable and denied the employer’s motion.  The Ninth Circuit reversed, finding only two aspects of the arbitration clause were unconscionable/unenforceable and those could be severed, allowing the rest of the arbitration clause to be enforced.  (The two stinkers: waiver of a representative PAGA claim (see Iskanian); and a provision allowing only the employer to go to court for injunctive or equitable relief.)

While the two classes of employees above were not able to continue prosecuting claims as a group (and had to go to arbitration), a class of consumers won the right to stay in court in Stevens-Bratton v. TruGreen, Inc., 2017 WL 108032 (6th Cir. Jan. 11, 2017).  In that case the class representative had hired a lawn care company for one year.   More than six months after the service contract had been terminated, the class representative received numerous telemarketing calls from the company, even though her number was on the Do-Not-Call Registry.  She then sued for violation of the TCPA.  In response, the lawn care company moved to compel arbitration, based on its service contract with the class representative, which “expressly waive[d] any ability to maintain any Class Action.”  The district court compelled arbitration, and the 6th Circuit reversed.  Although there is usually a presumption in favor of an arbitration agreement surviving the expiration of the rest of a contract, the court was not convinced that the dispute “had its real source in the contract.”  It found that the lawn care service contract was “irrelevant to this case,” since it had completely expired before the calls took place and the lawn services provided were not at issue in the TCPA claim.