Florida's Third DCA (Once Again) Narrowly Construes Protected Activity Under The FLSA

Defense lawyers should always remove Fair Labor Standards Act cases to federal court, right?

I thought so until last October, when Florida's Third District Court of Appeals, relying on the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals' decision in Kasten v. Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics Corp., 570 F.3d 834, 838-40 (7th Cir. 2009), ruled that to "file" a complaint under the FLSA, the employee must complain in writing. See Alvarado v. Bayshore Grove Mgmt., LLC, 2010 Fla. App. LEXIS 15020 (Fla. 3d DCA 2010). This decision was at odds with precedent in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit (which covers Florida, Georgia, and Alabama). I wrote a blog post at the time recommending that defense attorneys reconsider their practice of removing FLSA retaliation cases to federal court. If the employee did not make a written complaint, the employer was probably better off in state court, where the employer could argue that the employee did not engage in protected activity under the FLSA.

In March of this year, the United States Supreme Court vacated the Seventh Circuit's decision in Kasten, holding that oral complaints can suffice under the FLSA. See Kasten v. Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics Corp., 131 S. Ct. 1325 (U.S. 2011). I thought that it was back to business as usual, and that defense attorneys should resume their practice of removing FLSA retaliation cases to federal court.

Now I'm re-thinking that strategy again. Last week, the Third DCA issued a new decision in Alvarado that acknowledges the Supreme Court's holding in Kasten, but once again seems to construe the concept of protected activity under the FLSA more narrowly than Eleventh Circuit precedents. See Alvarado v. Bayshore Grove Mgmt, LLC, 2011 Fla. App. LEXIS 12136 (Fla. 3d DCA. Aug. 3, 2011).

In Alvarado, the plaintiff described his complaint to his employer as follows:

Just before I was fired on July 11, 2007, I complained to Defendant's management that I was not receiving the correct amount of pay since my time records were altered and/or falsified so as to avoid having to pay me overtime.

The Third DCA held that "[i]t is obvious that this 'complaint' fell far short of the degree of specificity and reference to the statute required by the Supreme Court [in Kasten]." In Kasten, the Supreme Court held that "[t]o fall within the scope of the antiretaliation provision, a complaint must be sufficiently clear and detailed for a reasonable employer to understand it, in light of...