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On June 9, 2011, Judge Philip Brimmer in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado issued a complicated ruling addressing a tangle of administrative and procedural issues in the EEOC-initiated religious discrimination pattern or practice lawsuit entitled EEOC v. JBS USA, LLC, No. 10-CV-02103 (D. Colo. June 9, 2011).  The decision examines the gamut of issues in EEOC pattern or practice litigation ranging from timeliness issues, administrative prerequisites, and the sometimes confounding interplay between governmental and private litigants.

The EEOC v. JBS case focused on the treatment of black Somali Muslim employees working at JBS’s Greeley, Colorado meat packing facility.  The EEOC's allegations included a host of claims, including harassment, discipline, discharge, and retaliation for engaging in protected activity.  Employees also claimed that JBS refused to allow them to pray during breaks and did not accommodate their observance of particular Muslim holidays.  As is noted below, it is significant that the employees were represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers Local #7, which was ringside for the back and forth between management and the Muslim employees.  Ultimately, the EEOC sued on the employees’ behalf on a pattern or practice theory.  Soon thereafter, two separate groups of employees filed their own respective complaints to intervene, seeking to join in the case en masse.  JBS moved to dismiss all three cases, claiming each was fatally flawed.

In a 30 page opinion, Judge Brimmer navigated a number of thorny procedural and administrative issues, with some interesting results.

Strict Adherence To Time Limitations
We start with one of the few positive notes - the Court limited the intervenors' claims to only those claims that occurred within 300 days of the filing of their respective administrative charges.  For some intervenors, this would gut their individual claims, as the flashpoint of the case occurred during Ramadan 2008 and in some cases more the 300 days before they filed their charges.  The Court acknowledged that with amorphous harassment claims, that claimants can sometimes rely on events outside of the 300 days, but noted that is not so of discrete acts.  Failure to accommodate religious beliefs, discipline, discharge and retaliation are discrete acts that the Court ruled must occur within the 300 day window.

Unfortunately for JBS, the positive rulings end there.

Lenient View On Exhaustion Argument And Premature Filing
The Court first acknowledged that Title VII plaintiffs are required to exhaust their administrative remedies with the EEOC before filing suit, and the fact that the intervenors in this case were also named in the EEOC’s lawsuit did not give them a pass on those prerequisites.

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Christopher DeGroff and Gerald L. Maatman, Jr. Seyfarth and Shaw LLP

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