Breuer v. Jim's Concrete of Brevard, Inc.
The Court ruled that employers can remove Fair Labor Standards Act wage-and-hour lawsuits from state court to federal court, because the wage law's phrase allowing a suit to be "maintained" in state court is too ambiguous to count as the kind of explicit ban on removal that federal law requires.
The decision resolves a split among federal appeals courts and confirms that workers who sue over unpaid wages or overtime in state court can have their case moved to federal court by their employer, just like most other civil lawsuits.
How it got here: The federal district court denied the worker's request to send the case back to state court and certified the question; the Eleventh Circuit affirmed, and the Supreme Court took the case to resolve a circuit split.
The Case in Depth
What happened
A worker sued his former employer, a concrete company, in Florida state court seeking unpaid wages, liquidated damages, interest, and attorney's fees under the federal wage-and-hour law. The employer moved the case to federal court. The worker argued the wage law's language letting a suit "be maintained" in state court meant employers could not do that.
The question before the Court
Can an employer move a worker's unpaid-wages lawsuit from state court to federal court, even though the wage law says such a suit "may be maintained" in state court?
Why it matters
Workers suing former employers for unpaid wages or overtime under the federal wage law can no longer assume their case will stay in the state court where they filed it. Employers can move such cases into federal court, which can mean added distance, cost, and delay for employees pursuing relatively small wage claims.
What changes now
The case remains in federal court, where the worker's wage claims will proceed on the merits under the Middle District of Florida's jurisdiction. The ruling settles the removal question for FLSA cases nationwide, resolving a disagreement between federal appeals courts, and similarly worded federal employment statutes are now understood to permit removal as well.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- A federal removal statute lets a defendant move a case from state to federal court unless Congress has expressly said otherwise for that type of claim, so the key legal question was whether the wage law contained such an express exception.
- The Court examined the wage law's text, which says a suit 'may be maintained' in state or federal court, and found the word 'maintain' genuinely ambiguous — it can mean either to begin a lawsuit or merely to continue one already filed.
- Because an express exception to removal must be clear and unmistakable, an ambiguous word like 'maintain' cannot satisfy that requirement; otherwise the word 'expressly' in the removal statute would do no real work.
- The Court contrasted this ambiguous phrasing with other federal statutes that plainly and unmistakably bar removal, showing Congress knows how to write a real removal ban when it wants one.
- The Court also reasoned that even reading 'maintain' as a right to see a case through to judgment, that right isn't defeated by removal, since removal just moves the case to a different court rather than ending it early.
- Applying this same ambiguous language to other similar federal employment statutes, the Court concluded that treating it as an express removal bar here would improperly bar removal under several other laws that use identical wording.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Limits Shamrock Oil & Gas Corp. v. Sheets (318 U. S. 100)
Its call for narrowly construing removal law was undercut by a later amendment requiring express exceptions.