KANSAS CITY (LN) — A federal judge in Kansas on Monday certified a class of landscape laborers pursuing overtime claims under the Missouri Minimum Wage Law against Signature Landscape, LLC, and denied the company's bid to dissolve a parallel Fair Labor Standards Act collective, ruling that Signature's blanket reliance on the Motor Carrier Act exemption to avoid paying overtime presents a single common question that can be resolved for all workers at once.
The ruling by a U.S. District Judge in the District of Kansas resolves four pending motions in a case brought by named plaintiffs Rogelio Garcia Valdez and Marbella Gomez, who allege that Signature — a commercial landscaping company operating four branches straddling the Kansas-Missouri border in the Kansas City metropolitan area — has never paid overtime to any of its more than 800 field employees, instead classifying them all as exempt under the Motor Carrier Act on the theory that their work directly affects the safe operation of commercial motor vehicles in interstate commerce.
The plaintiffs contend that approximately 93% of Valdez's workday was spent on manual landscaping tasks — planting, grading, installing hardscaping — that have nothing to do with vehicle safety. Deposition testimony from 43 plaintiffs, representing 27% of the collective, reflects that approximately 90% of the workday across the collective is spent on manual landscape labor rather than safety-affecting activities.
A threshold ruling concerned the territorial reach of the Missouri Minimum Wage Law. Signature argued the statute could not cover Kansas-based employees, but the court disagreed, finding that the law's core definition of Employee — any individual employed by an employer — contains no residency requirement. The court pointed to a telling contrast within the same statutory chapter: Section 290.528, which preempts local wage ordinances, defines Employee as an individual employed in this state, language conspicuously absent from the overtime provisions. That omission, the court held, was presumed intentional and favored applying the statute to any worker physically performing labor in Missouri, regardless of where they are based or where they start the day. The court held that the Missouri Minimum Wage Law covers hours physically worked in Missouri by employees of a Missouri-registered employer, regardless of the employees' state of residence or starting office.
On the FLSA decertification motion, Signature identified six categories of variation among the roughly 159 opt-in plaintiffs — the presence of both drivers and non-drivers, differences in road time, loading experiences, pre-trip inspections, non-driver assistance duties, and safety training — and argued those differences required subdividing the collective by job type. The court was unpersuaded, finding that the variations went to the evidence individual workers might offer in answering a single shared question: whether Signature's across-the-board Motor Carrier Act classification was lawful. The court also rejected Signature's statute-of-limitations argument, noting that willfulness under the FLSA focuses on the employer's state of mind, not individual attributes of employees, making it an inherently common inquiry.
On class certification under Rule 23(b)(3), the court found that common questions predominated, pointing to deposition testimony from 43 plaintiffs — 27% of the collective — reflecting that approximately 90% of the workday is spent on manual landscape labor rather than safety-affecting activities. Signature's own H-2B visa applications, internal job postings, and corporate testimony described identical duties for all landscape laborers, the court noted, and the company's sole defense was the Motor Carrier Act exemption.
The court also denied both sides' cross-motions for summary judgment, leaving the core exemption question for trial.
Valdez, a driver in Signature's landscape construction department who performed approximately 29% of his work in Missouri, was appointed class representative. The court appointed lead counsel Mr. Donelon — who has litigated wage-and-hour matters for three decades, been designated lead class counsel in over 100 cases, and whose firm has recovered in excess of $110 million in class and collective actions — along with Ms. Atwell-Soler, a certified Spanish-English court interpreter, a qualification the court described as of particular relevance in a case where the class is substantially composed of Spanish-speaking workers with limited English proficiency.
Individual claims in the case average $3,553.76 in lost overtime, an amount the court said is far below what would justify individual litigation for workers who largely lack English proficiency and knowledge of Missouri law. Many class members have returned to their home countries.