Kasten v. Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics Corp.
The Supreme Court ruled that workers who verbally complain about wage and hour violations are protected from retaliation just as much as those who complain in writing, rejecting a lower court's narrower reading of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
The decision matters because many workers—especially those who are less educated or less comfortable writing formal complaints—rely on spoken complaints to their employers or to government hotlines, and a written-only rule would have left them unprotected from being fired or punished for speaking up.
How it got here: A federal trial court granted summary judgment to the employer, and the Seventh Circuit affirmed, ruling that oral complaints aren't protected; Kasten appealed to the Supreme Court.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Kevin Kasten worked for Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics. He says he repeatedly told company officials, orally, that the placement of timeclocks illegally prevented workers from being paid for time spent putting on and taking off protective gear. He claims Saint-Gobain fired him for these complaints. Saint-Gobain says it fired him for failing to properly clock in and out after repeated warnings.
The question before the Court
Does a federal wage-and-hour law that protects workers who "filed any complaint" against retaliation cover complaints made out loud, not just in writing?
The Court's answer
Yes — the Court ruled that an employee's oral complaint can qualify as having "filed any complaint" under the Fair Labor Standards Act's antiretaliation provision, just as a written complaint would. The text alone didn't settle the question, since dictionary definitions and historical usage went both ways, but the law's purpose of encouraging workers—especially those less comfortable putting things in writing—to report violations pointed toward covering spoken complaints too.
The Court did add a limit: an oral complaint must be clear and detailed enough that a reasonable employer would understand it as an assertion of legal rights, not just griping. Whether Kasten's specific statements met that bar, and whether the law even covers complaints made only to an employer rather than the government, were left for lower courts to sort out.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Workers who raise concerns about pay violations by speaking to a supervisor, HR staffer, or a government hotline—rather than filing a written grievance—remain protected from being fired or punished for it. This preserves informal workplace complaint systems and phone-based government complaint lines as viable, legally protected ways for workers to report wage violations.
What changes now
The case is sent back to the lower courts, which must now decide whether Kasten's oral complaints actually gave Saint-Gobain fair notice that he was asserting his rights under the Act—a factual question the Supreme Court did not resolve. The Court also left open, without deciding, whether the antiretaliation provision even covers complaints made to a private employer as opposed to complaints filed with the government, an issue Saint-Gobain raised too late for the Court to consider.
What this does not decide
The Court did not decide whether Kasten's specific oral statements actually met the fair-notice standard—that's left to the lower courts. It also expressly left unresolved whether the antiretaliation provision protects complaints made only to a private employer, as opposed to complaints filed with a government agency, since that argument was raised too late.
Concurrences and dissents
Dissent — Justice Scalia
“The plain meaning of the critical phrase and the context in which appears make clear that the retaliation provision contemplates an official grievance filed with a court or an agency, not oral complaints—or even formal, written complaints—from an employee to an employer.”Scalia's central objection that the provision never covers employer-directed complaints at all.
Justice Scalia would have affirmed on a different ground: that the antiretaliation provision does not cover complaints made to an employer at all, only official complaints filed with a court or government agency. He argued the word 'complaint' has always carried this specialized legal meaning in the statute, pointed to the list of protected activities (testifying, serving on industry committees) as all involving government interaction, and criticized the majority's fair-notice standard as an atextual patch needed only because it left the employer-complaint question open.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court examined the text of the antiretaliation provision, which protects employees who have 'filed any complaint.' It found that dictionary definitions of 'filed' were split—some implying a writing, others allowing oral filings—so the word alone could not resolve whether oral complaints count.
- The Court noted that the word 'complaint' is modified by 'any,' a broadening term, and found that other state laws, federal regulations, and historical court usage from around the time the statute was passed commonly treated oral complaints as things that could be 'filed.' This showed the text alone did not foreclose an oral-complaint reading.
- Turning to the law's purpose, the Court reasoned that the statute depends on workers coming forward with complaints to be enforced effectively, and that limiting protection to written complaints would discourage illiterate, less educated, or overworked workers—exactly the workers the law was designed to help—from speaking up.
- The Court gave weight to the longstanding interpretations of the Department of Labor and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, both of which had consistently treated oral complaints as covered, reasoning that such longstanding agency views carry persuasive weight under the Skidmore framework (deference given to an agency's reasoned, consistent position, based on its power to persuade rather than binding legal authority).
- Balancing worker protection against employers' need for fair notice, the Court adopted a standard requiring that a complaint be clear and detailed enough that a reasonable employer would understand it as an assertion of rights under the Act, a standard that can be satisfied orally or in writing.
- Having concluded that the rule of lenity (a doctrine favoring narrower readings of ambiguous criminal statutes) did not apply because ordinary interpretive tools resolved the ambiguity, the Court concluded that oral complaints fall within the scope of 'filed any complaint.'