Mentha Smith v. T-Mobile USA Inc.

I. Background

Smith and Gossett (mother and son) are former hourly employees of T-Mobile USA, Inc. who worked as sales repre- sentatives in California. They brought an action in the district court against T-Mobile under the FLSA, California Labor Code § 200 et seq., and California Business and Professions Code § 17200 et seq. They alleged that T-Mobile willfully failed to pay its hourly employees for all the hours they worked, forcing employees to work “off the clock” and deny- ing pay for hours worked during breaks. Smith and Gossett sought to represent a class of approximately 25,000 former and current T-Mobile employees in a FLSA collective action.

On October 26, 2005, Smith and Gossett filed a motion for conditional certification of the collective action or, alterna- tively, tolling of the statute of limitations. They proposed to certify a class of “[a]ll hourly employees and former employ- ees of T-Mobile nationwide who worked at T-Mobile at any time for the period from three years predating the filing of th[e] complaint to the present.” The district court denied the 1 The FLSA states, in relevant part, that “no employer shall employ any of his employees . . . for a…