How A Court Ruling Made It Harder For Brewery Workers To Sue As A Group

What The Workers Say Happened

Anheuser-Busch runs a Williamsburg brewery with about 400 hourly workers across five departments. The company pays them for their scheduled shift, not for time spent badging into the building. Workers say the company required them to put on protective gear, including steel-toed boots, safety glasses, and in some roles wetsuits or Kevlar gloves, and to attend shift handoff meetings, all outside of paid shift hours.

• Named plaintiffs Thomas Overby and Abby Gearhart brought claims under the Virginia Wage Payment Act, the Virginia Overtime Wage Act, and the federal Fair Labor Standards Act.
• During COVID-19, the company’s own internal directive, titled “Expectations Mandatory for All,” required temperature checks, face coverings, handwashing, and shoe sanitization before workers could enter the building. Those practices ended in February 2022.
• None of these wage claims have been decided on the merits. This appeal was only about whether the workers could sue as a single class, not about who is right.

Legal Receipts

These are the record’s own words. They document context, not an admitted wrongdoing, since no misconduct has been established in this case.

“Anheuser-Busch expects employees to be at their workstations immediately at the start of their shift and to continue working there until the shift concludes.”

• This is the company’s own scheduling policy as described in the case record: pay starts and stops at the shift clock, not the badge swipe.
• It is the factual basis for the dispute. It is not, on its own, evidence that the policy broke the law.

“[a]n order granting certification . . . may force a defendant to settle rather than incur the costs of defending a class action and run the risk of potentially ruinous liability.”

• This line comes from the Rule 23 advisory committee notes, quoted by the court itself, describing how class certification generally pressures corporate defendants.
• The Fourth Circuit cited it to explain why it polices class certification so closely, which is the exact mechanism that worked in Anheuser-Busch’s favor here.

How Capitalism Exploits Delay: Time As A Corporate Weapon

This case has been alive since at least mid-2021, and after nearly five years it is still nowhere near a trial on the actual wage claims. The class period in the certified class reached back to July 1, 2020. Every year of appeals is a year workers do not get paid, if they are owed anything at all.

• Anheuser-Busch used its right to an interlocutory appeal under Rule 23(f), which let it challenge class certification years before any jury would hear the underlying wage facts.
• The company also asked the appeals court to review a separate denial of decertification for the related FLSA collective action; the court declined that request for lack of jurisdiction, but the attempt itself added another layer to the fight.
• The court’s own opinion acknowledges the structural incentive at play: class certification can pressure a company to “settle or bet the store,” which is precisely why defendants like Anheuser-Busch fight so hard to prevent certification in the first place.
• While the appeal worked its way through the courts, the underlying question, whether hundreds of workers were paid for the time they spent gearing up and briefing each other, has still not been answered.

This Is The System Working As Intended

Nothing about this outcome required anyone to break a rule. The Fourth Circuit applied a legal standard it built two years ago, and that standard is doing exactly what it was designed to do: make it harder for workers with small, varied claims to combine them into one case.

• In Stafford v. Bojangles’ Restaurants, Inc., 123 F.4th 671 (4th Cir. 2024), the court ruled that relying on broad, general company policies is usually not enough to certify a class. That precedent did the heavy lifting in this decision.
• The court found that even company-wide requirements, like baseline safety gear or pandemic screening, were not uniform enough to certify a class, because not every worker performed every task the same way or during the same period.
• The court explicitly noted that individual wage claims like these are often too small to be worth litigating alone, and that a class action can be “the only realistic route to recovery” for those workers, then still applied a standard that makes that route harder to use.
• The same opinion warns that class certification can pressure companies into “blackmail settlements,” a framing that treats the harm of a possible unjust settlement as symmetrical with the harm of workers never getting a hearing at all.

Societal Impact Mapping

Economic Inequality

• Individual claims over a few minutes of unpaid PPE donning or a missed handoff meeting are, on their own, too small for most workers to afford to litigate alone.
• The commonality standard applied here requires courts to examine each worker’s individual tasks, schedule, and time period before any group claim can proceed, which raises the cost and time needed just to get a case off the ground.
• Workers hired after February 2022 were swept into the same proposed class as workers who lived through the pandemic protocols, even though their circumstances were different, a mismatch the appeals court used as another reason to reject the class.
• A 2022 change to the Virginia Overtime Wage Act means some workers in this same class are governed by an entirely different legal standard than others, adding yet another individualized question standing between them and a single, unified case.

What A Legitimate Fix Looks Like

This case exposes a structural problem: courts are applying an increasingly granular commonality standard to wage claims that, almost by nature, involve some individual variation, which makes group litigation harder even when a company-wide pay policy is the actual root cause.

Regulatory Track

• The Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division could issue clearer guidance on when donning and doffing protective equipment counts as compensable work, reducing the case-by-case litigation this ruling shows is otherwise required.
• Regulators could require employers using badge-swipe or timekeeping systems, like the one at issue here, to reconcile that data against paid hours automatically, rather than leaving workers to prove gaps case by case.

Legislative Track

• State courts and legislatures could clarify procedures for certifying subclasses along documented lines of variation, such as job department or time period, instead of treating “too much variation” as a reason to deny class treatment outright.
• Virginia’s 2022 change tying the state overtime law to the federal FLSA created a split-standard problem for workers whose employment spans the change. Lawmakers could adopt transition provisions that prevent that split from defeating group litigation on its own.

Corporate Governance Track

This is a general industry standard, not a finding from this case, since the record does not document a specific governance failure at Anheuser-Busch.

• Employers running badge-swipe timekeeping systems could, as standard practice, reconcile that data against paid shift hours on a regular basis to catch unpaid pre- or post-shift work before it becomes a multi-year legal dispute.

What Now?

The case returns to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, where the judge can try to certify narrower subclasses or deny class treatment altogether. Nothing about workers’ underlying wage claims has been decided.

• Watch: the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division, which handles FLSA donning-and-doffing disputes like this one nationally.
• Watch: the Eastern District of Virginia docket (4:21-cv-00141-AWA-DEM) for how the subclass question gets resolved on remand.
• Workers who believe they weren’t paid for required pre- or post-shift tasks can start by logging their own hours against their pay stubs and badge records.
• Organizations like the National Employment Lawyers Association and the North Carolina Justice Center, both of which weighed in on this exact case, publish resources for workers navigating wage claims.