Key Points

  • The Commonwealth Court held that the three-year statute of limitations in the Wage Payment and Collection Law governs employee civil actions to recover wages under Section 13 of the Minimum Wage Act, including actions the Department of Labor and Industry brings as assignee-trustee.
  • The majority read the two statutes in pari materia because they relate to the same class of persons and things, and relied on the Minimum Wage Act's three-year payroll-record preservation requirement in Section 8.
  • The court held that the trial court erred by applying the Judicial Code's six-year catch-all period, 42 Pa. C.S. ยง5527(b), without examining the nature of the claim as Ash v. Continental Insurance Co. requires, and rejected the argument that a statute's remedial nature alone triggers the catch-all.
  • The majority stated that it did not rely on the federal district court decisions that have applied the three-year period since 1993, and that the limit does not apply to sovereign enforcement actions such as suits for civil penalties.
  • Judge Wallace dissented, concluding that the Minimum Wage Act is unambiguous, that the legislature intentionally omitted a limitations period, and that the six-year residual period applies.

Pennsylvania employees who sue under the state's Minimum Wage Act to recover unpaid wages must file within three years, a divided Commonwealth Court held Wednesday, reversing a trial court that had given such claims six years.

Senior Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt wrote for the 2-1 panel that the Minimum Wage Act, which sets no filing deadline of its own, must be read together with the state's Wage Payment and Collection Law, which gives workers three years to sue. The ruling went against the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry, which had sued on behalf of 20 pharmacy employees seeking overtime pay for work done between 2017 and 2019.

The decision supplies a deadline the Minimum Wage Act's text omits. Federal district courts in Pennsylvania have applied the three-year period to Minimum Wage Act claims since 1993, the majority noted, but the state trial court had rejected those decisions because they offered no supporting analysis.

The department's Bureau of Labor Law Compliance brought the case against Accuserv Pharmacy Inc., North Huntingdon Medical Inc. and Marvin Sheffler. The bureau acted as trustee for the employees, holding claims they had assigned to it. Its amended complaint, filed May 8, 2023, listed pay periods ending no later than May 25, 2019.

The employers moved for judgment on the pleadings, a request to decide a case on the filings alone, arguing that the claims were too old. The Westmoreland County Court of Common Pleas denied the motion on June 27, 2024. It applied the Judicial Code's six-year "catch-all" limitations period, which covers civil actions that lack another specified deadline. The trial court then certified the question for an immediate appeal, which the Commonwealth Court accepted on Dec. 13, 2024.

Leavitt grounded the three-year rule in two provisions. The Wage Collection Law bars suits brought "more than three years after the day on which such wages were due and payable." The Minimum Wage Act requires employers to keep records of hours and wages, which "shall be preserved for a period of three years."

"This legislative choice was neither arbitrary nor coincidental but deliberate," Leavitt wrote of the matching periods, noting that the state's Statutory Construction Act directs courts to give effect to every provision of a statute. "The Department gives zero effect to Section 8 of the Minimum Wage Act," she wrote.

The majority relied on the in pari materia rule, under which statutes relating to the same persons or things are read together as one statute. Both laws let employees sue for unpaid wages and let the Secretary of Labor and Industry pursue a worker's assigned claim in trust. The two statutes "must be read together unless it is impossible to do so," Leavitt wrote. "The Department has not identified any impediment, let alone an impossibility."

The department had argued that the Minimum Wage Act imposes no deadline at all, citing a 2001 Illinois appellate decision that exempted a state minimum wage enforcement action from any time limit. Leavitt wrote that the department "misapprehends this precedent from our sister state." The Illinois case involved a suit on behalf of the general public, she explained, while Pennsylvania's secretary sues as trustee for individual employees.

The department also argued that minimum wage violations take longer to detect than missed paychecks, because "workers know fairly immediately whether they have been paid on time." The majority rejected that premise. "The calculation of any wage can be nuanced, regardless of whether based upon a statutory table, a handshake, or a written agreement," Leavitt wrote. She added that a federal court has held that an employer's failure to post the act's requirements in the workplace tolls, or pauses, the three-year clock.

Leavitt wrote that the court did not rely on the federal decisions, though their history rebutted the department's point that lawmakers never added a deadline to the act. "Such an amendment would be redundant and unnecessary given the federal decisional law on the matter," she wrote.

The court separately held that the trial court erred by applying the six-year period without first examining the nature of the claim, as the Pennsylvania Supreme Court required in Ash v. Continental Insurance Co. in 2007. The panel also rejected the department's argument that remedial statutes receive the six-year period. Leavitt wrote that the trial court had produced mismatched deadlines for the two wage laws, an outcome a 2025 Colorado Supreme Court decision called "illogical."

Judge Stacy Wallace dissented. She wrote that the Minimum Wage Act is unambiguous and that courts may read statutes together only to resolve ambiguity. "We don't reach in pari materia without ambiguity," Wallace wrote. She noted that the legislature passed the Minimum Wage Act six years after the Wage Collection Law without adding a deadline or a cross-reference to the older law. "The General Assembly could have easily supplied the same limitations period in the Minimum Wage Act; however, it did not," she wrote.

Wallace also wrote that the two statutes serve different functions. The Wage Collection Law primarily enforces employment agreements, she wrote, while the Minimum Wage Act provides "a statutory wage floor which trumps contractual employment agreements." She would have affirmed the six-year period, writing that she would "decline to support a decision that prematurely ousts the Department from proceeding to adjudication on the merits."

The majority responded in a footnote to the dissent's reliance on the act's broad purpose. "Respectfully, the purpose of a statute is not a relevant inquiry," Leavitt wrote. The opinion also said the Wage Collection Law's three-year limit has no application to enforcement actions the secretary brings in a sovereign capacity, such as suits for civil penalties.

The court's order reversed the trial court's June 27, 2024, order denying the employers' motion for judgment on the pleadings. The order contained no remand instructions.