By Gerald L. Maatman, Jr. and Alex W. Karasik

Seyfarth Synopsis: In an EEOC lawsuit alleging that an employer failed to reasonably accommodate its Muslim employees’ requests for prayer breaks, a federal court in Colorado granted the EEOC’s motion for sanctions — as a result of the employer’s failure to preserve and produce various records — and barred the employer from presenting evidence, testimony, or arguments that unscheduled prayer breaks led to production line slowdowns or stoppages.  This ruling provides an important lesson for businesses regarding the preservation of documents in ongoing EEOC litigation.

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In EEOC v. JBS USA, LLC, Case No. 10-CV-02103, 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 122908 (D. Colo. Aug. 4, 2017), the EEOC alleged that JBS USA, LLC (“JBS”), a meat packing company, discriminated against its Muslim employees on the basis of religion by engaging in a pattern or practice of retaliation, discriminatory discipline and discharge, harassment, and denying its Muslim employees reasonable religious accommodations.  After the EEOC moved for sanctions regarding JBS’s failure to produce two types of records relating to delays on JBS’s production line, Judge Phillip A. Brimmer of the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado granted in part the EEOC’s motion and barred JBS from presenting evidence, testimony, or argument in its motions, at hearings, or at trial that unscheduled prayer breaks led to production line slowdowns or stoppages.

For employers involved in government enforcement litigation, this ruling serves as a cautionary tale regarding the importance of preserving and producing relevant records, and that the failure to do so might cost employers the ability to later use such records in their defense.

For more information on this lawsuit (and a similar Nebraska case where JBS successfully obtained summary judgment), see our blog posts here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Case Background

JBS operates a beef processing plant in Greeley, Colorado.  Id. at *2.  During the first week of Ramadan 2008, a dispute occurred between JBS and its Muslim employees over their opportunities to pray, resulting in hundreds of Muslim employees walking off the job.  On September 10, 2008, JBS fired 96 Muslim employees that refused to return to work.  After the mass termination, numerous former employees filed discrimination charges with the EEOC.  Id.  In response, on February 3, 2009, JBS submitted a position statement where it argued that granting prayer breaks to employees would be an undue burden, in part, due to losses resulting from “each minute of production down-time.”  Id.  JBS continued to assert its undue burden affirmative defense throughout the case, for instance, arguing in its summary judgment motion that production line slowdowns and downtime would have been caused by allowing prayer breaks to Muslim employees.

The EEOC sought discovery from JBS about its undue burden affirmative defense.  Relevant here, on November 21, 2012, the EEOC served a production request regarding the production of all reports or data showing all dates and times the fabrication lines on any and all shifts were stopped, as well as the speed of the lines.  In response, JBS produced documents that included records showing scheduled breaks, but did not provide or reference the Down Time Reports or Clipboards, which show unplanned downtime and slowdowns.  The EEOC thereafter moved for sanctions for the loss or destruction of documents directly relevant to JBS’s allegations of undue hardship.

The Court’s Decision

The Court granted the EEOC’s motion for sanctions.  While JBS had produced Clipboards from 2012-2016 and Down Time Reports from 2016, it claimed that all others had been destroyed.  JBS later testified via Rule 30(b)(6) deposition that the Down Time Reports were shipped to storage each year, but may have been destroyed.  After searching its warehouse for “a day” in 2017,  JBS later located and produced some additional records.  Id. at *6.  The Court thus found that JBS failed to supplement its production with responsive records in a timely manner.  The Court held that because JBS did not show that its failure to supplement was substantially justified or harmless, it would impose sanctions pursuant to Fed. R. Civ. P. 37(c)(1).  Id.

Next, the Court explained that spoliation occurs when a party loses or destroys evidence that it had a duty to preserve because it was relevant to proof of an issue at trial in current or anticipated litigation.  Id. at *7 (citation omitted).  JBS argued that it did not have a duty to preserve these documents because it had no way of knowing or anticipating that the EEOC would be interested in knowing the specific time of every instance of every day that the production line stopped for an unplanned or unexpected reason.  The Court rejected this argument, holding that JBS ignored the fact that it asserted an undue burden defense within a year of the September 2008 incident and after charges of discrimination had been filed against it.  As such, the Court held that JBS had a duty to preserve documents relevant to the burden posed by the proposed accommodations.  Id. at *8 (citation omitted).

Arguing that the lack of production of records did not cause a prejudice to the EEOC, JBS stated that the records did not show whether any slowdown or stoppage was related to a prayer break because the information they contained was “only as specific as the information known to the person filling out the Down Time Report.”  Id. at *10.  The Court rejected this argument, holding that “[r]ecords such as those sought, which potentially show the actual impact of unscheduled employee prayer breaks, are particularly important to understanding the impact such breaks would have on production line slowdowns or stoppages because they would provide contemporaneous records of whether unscheduled breaks led to production downtime.”  Id. at *12.  Accordingly, the Court found that the EEOC was prejudiced by JBS’s spoliation of evidence.  Id.

In fashioning a sanction that “appropriately addresses the prejudice to the EEOC resulting from JBS’s spoliation or failure to produce the records and is proportional to JBS’s culpability,” the Court held that it would bar JBS from presenting evidence, testimony, or argument in its motions, at hearings, or at trial that unscheduled prayer breaks led to production line slowdowns or stoppages.  Id. at *14.  The Court explained that this sanction was “tailored to the evidence lost, destroyed, or withheld by JBS because it alleviates the prejudice which the EEOC would otherwise suffer, namely, that JBS may present evidence of stoppages through witnesses, but the EEOC would not be able to rebut such testimony with records that would likely prove whether stoppages actually occurred and, perhaps, for what reason.”  Id.  Accordingly, the Court granted in part the EEOC’s motion for sanctions for the loss or destruction of documents.

Implications For Employers

An employer’s likelihood of defeating a workplace class action is often dependent on its ability maintain and preserve thorough employment records.  Here, the employer’s failure to preserve records that ultimately could have helped establish an affirmative defense resulted in the Court limiting the employer from using certain types of evidence in its defense of the litigation.  This sanction should serve as a cautionary tale for employers in regards to complying with the written discovery process, as employers are best-positioned to defeat workplace class actions when they have as many defenses as possible in their arsenal.

Readers can also find this post on our EEOC Countdown blog here.