Injustice of disabilities lawsuit off the charts

By Brandon Underwood

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There was cause for celebration last Wednesday. An Iowa jury awarded 32 workers with mental disabilities $240 million in a disability discrimination lawsuit brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). This adds to the millions already awarded to the workers in cases brought by the EEOC and the Department of Labor (DOL).

Cruel reality, though, tempers the celebration. The workers are not likely to see much of the money awarded to them by the courts. Henry's Turkey Service is broke. The huge award is hugely symbolic.

The DOL and the EEOC, agencies that enforce federal labor and employment laws, chose to sue only Henry's, the employer that brought the workers from Texas. The government lawyers chose not to sue West Liberty Foods, the current owner of the factory, which was previously owned by Philip Morris, where the disabled men started working 40 years ago. With years of profits from the workers' labor, and hundreds of millions of dollars of annual revenue, West Liberty would have been the proper defendant to sit alongside Henry's in federal court.

Under federal labor and employment laws, a worker may have more than one employer, meaning that more than one company can be held responsible for violating the law. Courts rely on the joint-employment doctrine. Under the right conditions, a court will find that the contractor and the factory are joint employers of the worker and both would be liable for violating anti-discrimination laws and wage and hour laws.

To determine whether an employer is a joint employer, courts examine factors that include who owns the site at which the work is performed, who owns the facilities, equipment, and tools the workers use, and who controls the work. In this case, West Liberty Foods owned the factory where the 32 men worked. The workers used West Liberty's equipment, machinery and disassembly line to process turkeys. They performed the same work as West Liberty Foods' regular employees did.

West Liberty Foods had to control the work performed by the workers with disabilities. No manufacturer would allow a group of workers to decide how to manufacture the company's product. A federal court described the workers' hours as “dictated” by West Liberty Foods' disassembly lines.

Henry's Turkey Service and West Liberty Foods were joint employers and should have been held responsible for violating the law. One could not dream up a clearer case of joint employment. The federal agencies' choice not to sue West Liberty is inexplicable.

In enforcing the law, the government must make strategic decisions. One critical consideration is whether or not it can collect from a defendant. Its lawyers had to have known that a victory against Henry's would leave the workers with nothing.

Whether the government can win at trial is a critical determination. There is no reasonable legal analysis by which the agencies could have concluded that they would not win judgments against West Liberty. But the agencies still decided not to sue West Liberty Foods. So, the mercilessly abused workers have nothing.

The injustice of this case is monumental. The EEOC secured the largest award in its history, and it is meaningless. The exploited workers may never see a nickel. The one company from which the workers could have gotten their money never had to defend itself in court. That is nothing to celebrate.

l Brandon Underwood is a Juris Doctor candidate, 2013, at the University of Iowa College of Law. Comments: brandon-underwood@uiowa.edu]