Key Points

  • Under American Pipe tolling, a plaintiff who fits a class definition keeps the limitations period paused until a later definition unambiguously excludes him.
  • A plaintiff's plausible reading of a class definition that includes him preserves tolling, even if the defendant offers a plausible or better reading.
  • The test is whether a plaintiff without counsel would understand that the class definition unambiguously excluded him.
  • Bien's 2015 color vision test and Union Pacific's committee review plausibly subjected him to a fitness-for-duty examination within the certified Harris class.
  • The Fifth Circuit reversed the limitations dismissal and remanded, including the unaddressed question of administrative exhaustion.

A federal appeals court on Monday revived a former Union Pacific Railroad Co. conductor's disability-discrimination suit, holding that a 2016 class action against the railroad paused the deadline on his claim because the class's later, narrower definition did not clearly exclude him.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed a federal judge in the Eastern District of Texas who had dismissed James Bien's Americans with Disabilities Act suit as untimely. Circuit Judge Jerry E. Smith wrote for a panel that included Circuit Judges Haynes and Engelhardt.

The ruling applies American Pipe tolling, a rule drawn from the Supreme Court's 1974 decision in American Pipe & Construction Co. v. Utah, under which courts "stop the clock" on a claim's limitations period while the plaintiff fits the definition of a pending class action. The panel held that tolling continues unless a later class definition unambiguously excludes the plaintiff, and that a plaintiff's plausible reading that keeps him in the class preserves tolling.

Bien failed a color vision test and a follow-up field test in 2013 as part of his Federal Railroad Administration certification. Union Pacific removed him from his conductor job that July and told him his restriction could not be accommodated. In 2014 the railroad hired him as a manager of crew utilization, a position that paid less.

In September 2015, after Union Pacific notified him of a recertification physical, Bien took another color vision test and passed. He asked the railroad for the field test needed to confirm his recertification and for reinstatement. The 2015 test was "done in error," the opinion said, because Union Pacific had given it to Bien by mistake.

In an October 2015 letter, Union Pacific told Bien that a committee had reviewed his request. The committee concluded that his color vision deficiency was presumed hereditary and permanent, ruled that the passing 2015 result "does not negate or override the finding" of the failed 2013 field test, and denied a retest.

Bien filed a discrimination charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Texas Workforce Commission in April 2020 and sued in January 2025. His suit depended on whether a February 2016 class action filed by other workers against Union Pacific in Nebraska federal court, Harris v. Union Pacific Railroad Company, had tolled his deadline.

The Harris plaintiffs first proposed a class of employees who suffered adverse employment actions "for reasons related to a Fitness-for-Duty evaluation." In February 2019, the Nebraska court certified a narrower class of individuals who "have been or will be subject to a fitness-for-duty examination as a result of a reportable health event." The Texas court held that Bien belonged to the first class but not the second, which meant the limitations period on his claims had run. If certification ended tolling, the Fifth Circuit noted, he had until Dec. 2, 2019, to file his EEOC charge; he filed in April 2020.

The district court granted Union Pacific's Rule 12(b)(6) motion, a request to dismiss a complaint for failure to state a claim. On appeal, Union Pacific argued that an "examination" under its Medical Rules is one discrete part of a broader fitness-for-duty evaluation, and that Bien was never "subject to" one because he requested the review and the railroad merely declined to reopen his case. Bien responded that the railroad's own rules use "evaluation" and "examination" interchangeably.

Relying on its 2024 decision in Zaragoza v. Union Pacific Railroad, which also involved tolling from the Harris case, the panel said any rule short of unambiguous exclusion "would encourage plaintiffs to file individual suits the moment a class definition is arguably narrowed." "American Pipe does not require a plaintiff to squint at the words of a class definition to divine his exclusion from imprecise alterations or subtle shifts of syntax," Smith wrote.

Defendants "may not create exclusion out of fine-grained linguistic variations among definitions," the court held. It framed the question as "whether a plaintiff without counsel would understand" that a revised definition left him out, and said only the plainest cases of exclusion, ones requiring no lawyer to spot, can end tolling. Conversely, "a plaintiff who offers a plausible reading of the class definition that includes him will enjoy the benefit of American Pipe tolling," Smith wrote.

Applying that standard, the panel found it plausible that the 2015 test and the committee's review subjected Bien to a fitness-for-duty examination. "The fact that the test was given in error is not relevant to whether he was plausibly 'subjected to an examination' per the certified class definition," Smith wrote.

The panel also said Union Pacific's Medical Rules, which define a fitness-for-duty evaluation to include "all medical tests, examinations, and evaluations," leave room for a lay reader to treat "examination" and "evaluation" as interchangeable.

Union Pacific also argued, citing a 2024 Ninth Circuit decision, that the certified class was deliberately narrowed to workers examined "as a result of a reportable health event." The panel said the narrowing, as that decision described it, excluded only workers examined as a routine matter of employment, and it called Bien's tests "arguably reportable health events." Like the shift from "related to" to "result of," the panel said, quoting a 2024 Eighth Circuit decision, that narrowing turns "on the kinds of subtle distinctions in language that are fodder for lawyers and quicksand for laymen."

"Union Pacific has provided elegant and persuasive arguments for why its reading is the best rendering of the text," Smith wrote. "But it has not provided a reading so unambiguously clear that a bystander plaintiff such as Bien would have recognized his exclusion with no plausible contrary argument."

The panel declined to decide whether Bien had exhausted his administrative remedies. The district court had treated that question as moot. Because Bien did not raise exhaustion in his opening brief and the issue drew little briefing, the Fifth Circuit sent it back for the trial court to address. The panel placed no limits on what the district court may take up on remand and said it would "express no view on what decisions it should announce."