New York Federal Court Denies Class Certification to Unpaid Interns
By Bill Allen
On May 8, 2013, in Wang v. Hearst Corp., the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York denied certification under Rule 23 of a class of unpaid interns at Hearst Magazines.
First, the court found that Rule 23(a)(2)’s commonality requirement was not satisfied under the Supreme Court’s standard in Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. because the plaintiffs could not “show anything more than a uniform policy of unpaid internship.” The plaintiffs’ evidence of a corporate-wide policy of classifying the proposed class members as unpaid interns was insufficient to establish commonality because the duties of the interns varied greatly from each other and from magazine to magazine. The court acknowledged that even after Dukes, “courts of this district have routinely found commonality in analogous misclassification cases,” but distinguished this case because the plaintiffs were not able to show a company-wide policy regarding their duties in addition to a company-wide policy regarding their classification. The court rejected the interns’ argument that the court should look to "the nature of the work that interns performed" to find commonality, stating that the “glaring problem” is that there is no common proof from which the court could determine the "nature" of the interns' work.
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