A group of school bus drivers and attendants in Charles County, Md., claiming they weren’t paid correctly for overtime hours, as required under the Fair Labor Standards Act, brought suit in federal district court to recover unpaid wages from the school district and the contractor used by the district.
The contractor filed a response to the claim, but the school district filed a motion to dismiss the suit against them on the basis that school districts are immune from such lawsuits under the 11th Amendment of the US Constitution:
The judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by citizens of another state, or by citizens or subjects of any foreign state.
The amendment has been interpreted by the Supreme Court to protect unwilling states or their agencies from lawsuits in federal court [1], but just because school boards have a right of immunity doesn’t mean they have to exercise it all the time. Furthermore, laws in Maryland [2] waive the immunity in cases involving a contract action, personal injury, or discrimination, as state legislatures are allowed to do [3]. The law also says boards of education may not claim immunity in any claim for $100,000 or less.
The claim by the bus drivers was for an amount “not less than” $100,000, so the last clause doesn’t apply. If the claim were for less than $100,000, the district would automatically not be able to claim immunity under the 11th Amendment.
The issue here was the nature of the claim itself. The district court found that the lawsuit for unpaid overtime was a dispute involving employment law, and therefore based on a contract or, at least, an implied contract. The school district therefore couldn’t claim sovereign immunity, the lower court found.
However, the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (Md., N.C., S.C., Va., W.Va.) considered a different part of Maryland law, namely Section 5-518 of the Courts and Judicial Proceedings Article of the Annotated Code of Maryland, to see if it constituted a waiver:
(b) A county board of education, described under Title 4, Subtitle 1 of the Education Article, may raise the defense of sovereign immunity to any amount claimed above the limit of its insurance policy or, if selfinsured or a member of a pool described under § 4-7 105(c)(1)(ii) of the Education Article, above $100,000.
Their decision hinged on tying the lawsuit to the district’s liability insurance. The language of Maryland law is fairly broad here: this could mean immunity could be claimed in “any” lawsuit at all, as long as it was for more than a given amount, including those involving employment law. The appellate court instead saw this statute in the context of liability insurance, ruling per curiam in an unpublished opinion, here, that school districts could claim sovereign immunity in any case that would normally be covered by liability insurance held by the district.
Citing a Maryland case known as Board of Education of Worcester County v Beka Industries, Inc., 18 A.3d 890, 907 (Md. 2011), the court said FLSA claims “are contractual in their nature. That is so because the FLSA’s overtime provisions ‘are read into and become a part of every employment contract that is subject to’ the FLSA’s terms, and thus ‘[t]he liability of the employer [in an action under the FLSA for unpaid overtime] is for the wages due under working agreements which the federal statute compels employer and employee to make.’
“In light of the contractual nature of the FLSA claim, we conclude that Maryland courts would not consider it to be an ’employment law’ claim in this context. Because we conclude that § 5-518, as the Maryland courts have construed it, does not apply to Plaintiffs’ FLSA claim, we hold that Maryland has not even partially waived the Board Appellants’ Eleventh Amendment immunity against the claim. Thus, we reverse the district court’s denial of the Board Appellants’ motion to dismiss and remand for entry of judgment in their favor.”
Footnotes:
- 1. Supreme Court decisions … Edelman v. Jordan, 415 U.S. 651, 662-63 (1974); Will v. Michigan Dep’t of State Police, 491 U.S. 58, 70-71 (1989). This immunity also protects “state agents and state instrumentalities,” Regents of the Univ. of Cal. v. Doe, 519 U.S. 425, 429 (1997)
- 2. See Annotated Code of Maryland, § 12-201(a): “Except as otherwise expressly provided by a law of the State, the State, its officers, and its units may not raise the defense of sovereign immunity in a contract action, in a court of the State, based on a written contract that an official or employee executed for the State …” et seq. at (c).
- 3. College Sav. Bank v. Florida Prepaid Postsecondary Educ. Expense Bd., 527 U.S. 666, 675-76, 680 (1999)
