United States District Court, N.D. California
CHARLES E. WARD, individually, and on behalf of all others similarly situated, Plaintiff,
v.
UNITED AIRLINES, INC., Defendant.
ORDER RE CROSS-MOTIONS FOR SUMMARY JUDGMENT
WILLIAM ALSUP UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE
INTRODUCTION
In this
certified class action involving alleged deficiencies on pay
stubs for airline pilots, both sides move for summary
judgment. To the extent stated below, defendant’s
motion for summary judgment is Granted. Plaintiff’s is
Denied.
STATEMENT
At all
relevant times, plaintiff Charles E. Ward worked as a pilot
for defendant United Airlines, Inc., a major passenger
airline serving destinations all over the world. Ward resided
(and continues to reside) in Marin County. A prior order
certified a class defined as follows (Dkt. No. 44 at 14):
All persons who are or were employed by United Airlines,
Inc., as pilots for whom United applied California income tax
laws pursuant to 49 U.S.C. 40116(f)(2) at any time from April
3, 2014 up to April 3, 2015.
Section
40116(f)(2) of Title 49 of the United States Code provides
two means for determining which state’s income tax laws
applies to an airline worker: (i) the state of the
employee’s residence, or (ii) the state in which the
employee earned more than fifty percent of his or her pay.
United applied California tax laws to the class members (and
all pilots nationally) based on their place of residence,
because its pilots rarely, if ever, performed more than half
their work in any one state (Spars Decl. ¶ 5).
All
agree that the class members have been fully paid their
compensation; the disagreement is over the form of statement
of wages. All got a statement but class counsel insists the
statement should have followed the California-prescribed form
of statement. This order disagrees.
Class
members spent less than an average of twelve percent of their
total work time within California, which broke down to
approximately three percent of the total work time on flights
entirely within California and eight-and-a-half percent of
the time on flights within the geographical bounds of
California on flights in or out of California. The record
does not, however, reflect the range of the class
members’ time in California nor whether any pilot spent
a majority of his or her flight time in California during any
bid period. Of the examples provided by United, the greatest
amount of work time spent in California in a single bid
period was forty-two percent. Ward himself spent a maximum of
thirty-six percent of his work time in California, though he
averaged twenty percent in 2014 and fifteen percent in 2015
(Baker Decl. ¶¶ 8, 11, 20-21).[1]
United
assigned routes to pilots according to schedules that roughly
equated to calendar months called “bid periods”
(so called because pilots could bid for particular routes,
which United assigned according to seniority). In a given bid
period, a pilot could work as a lineholder pilot, meaning
United assigned him or her a predetermined flight schedule,
or a reserve pilot, meaning he or she remained on call to fly
segments as-needed. A collective bargaining agreement between
United and the Air Line Pilots Association, established
pursuant to the Railway Labor Act, governed the terms and
conditions of employment for United’s pilots, including
the scheduling procedure and compensation structure (White
Decl. ¶¶ 2-3).
United
paid its pilots twice monthly, on the first and the sixteenth
day of each month. The collective bargaining agreement set
forth three methods for calculating a pilot’s total pay
for a bid period: (i) line-pay value, (ii) minimum-pay
guarantee, and (iii) protected-time credit (available only to
lineholder pilots). A pilot’s total compensation for a
bid period would be the largest of the three measures.
United, however, calculated the amount of the first payment
in a bid period (on the first of the month) based on a
formulaic estimate of the total hours it anticipated the
pilot would work during the pay period. United called this
first payment a “Flight Advance.” The second
payment (on the sixteenth of the month) amounted to the
difference between the Flight Advance and the total
compensation owed to the pilot for that pay period (again,
the greater of the three measures identified above) plus
certain bonuses (called “add pay”) (KohSweeny
Decl., Exh. G; White Decl. ¶ 4).
The
line-pay value constituted the primary means of calculating
each pilot’s compensation, and United calculated it as
the pilot’s time spent performing various work
activities (such as piloting, co-piloting, taxiing, training,
or flying as a passenger on a flight in order to start an
assignment from a different city) multiplied by the
applicable rates for each respective activity as set forth in
the collective bargaining agreement. The determination of the
applicable rates depended not only on the nature of the
activity, but also the type of aircraft, the pilot’s
title, and the pilot’s seniority. The minimum-pay
guarantee (available to all pilots) and the protected-time
credit (available only to lineholder pilots) each calculated
total pay based on a formula relating to a pilot’s
assignments, rather than his or her actual hours worked. This
ensured that pilots did not get penalized for accepting
shorter flight segments (which yielded lower compensation) or
for unavoidable circumstances such as flight cancellations or
schedule changes. In other words, the latter measures could
only be triggered if a pilot’s actual time worked
during a bid period fell short of the amount expected based
on his or her assignment for that period (White Decl.
¶¶ 7-8).
As
stated, the amount of a pilot’s first paycheck in a bid
period (the Flight Advance) never related to the hours the
pilot actually worked during that bid period. The second
paycheck in a bid period only related to the hours the pilot
actually worked if the greatest of the three measures
identified above was the line-pay value.
United
issued a “pay advice” to each pilot, which
detailed the pilot’s wages for the given pay period.
For pilots who received paper paychecks, United issued
pilots’ pay advices appended to the checks. For pilots
who received payment via direct deposit, United delivered the
pay advices through its internal website and offered pilots
the option to receive a paper copy in the mail. The pay
advices did not list pilots’ hours worked or the
applicable rates, regardless of the ...