On April 4, 2002, current and former Hispanic employees of Bashas', Inc. filed a class action in the U.S. District Court of Arizona under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000e et seq., and 42 U.S.C. § 1981, against Bashas'. The plaintiffs, represented by an Impact Fund attorney and private counsel, sought declaratory, injunctive and monetary relief as well as class certification. They alleged national origin and race discrimination of their employer in pay and working conditions on behalf of themselves and all other similarly situated Latino employees.

After some discovery disputes, Parra v. Bashas', Inc., 2004 WL 5642419, on August 29, 2005, the District Court (Judge Robert C. Broomfield) certified the proposed class on the issue of working conditions, but denied certification of such class as to the issue of pay due to a lack of commonality within the class. Parra v. Bashas', Inc., 2005 WL 6182338 (D. Ariz. Aug. 29, 2005). Plaintiffs subsequently filed a motion for reconsideration and offered to redefine the pay discrimination class. The District Court denied their motion, 2006 WL 5987819, and the plaintiffs appealed the Court's decision to the 9th Circuit Court.

The Court of Appeals reversed the lower court's ruling that the plaintiffs failed to establish commonality within the proposed class regarding the pay discrimination claim, in an opinion by Judge Procter R. Hug on July 29, 2008. The Court found it an abuse of discretion of the lower court and remanded the case back to the District Court for further consideration. Parra v. Bashas', 536 F.3d 975 (9th Cir. 2008).

(In the meantime, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was also proceeding against the same defendant, seeing enforcement of an administrative subpoena. The court in this case agreed to plaintiffs' request that that matter be transferred to it. 2009 WL 1024615. )

Upon remand, the District Court (Judge Broomfield) finally granted the plaintiff's original motion for class certification on the pay issue on May 31, 2013. In the same opinion, the court also, at defendants' request, decertified the working conditions class, in light of the recent Supreme Court precedent of Dukes v. Wal-Mart. This ended the decade-long dispute as to the issue of class certification. Parra v. Bashas', Inc., 2013 WL 2407204 (D. Ariz. May 31, 2013).

Pursuant to party stipulation, the court amended the class on March 31, 2014 to "All Hispanic workers currently and formerly employed by defendant Bashas’ in an hourly position at any Food City retail store between April 4, 1998 and July 1, 2007, who have been subject to the challenged pay policies and practices." The court explicitly excluded "any member who worked for Food City for less than eight (8) hours during the Class Period or any person who was first hired for an hourly position at Food City after January 2, 2005."

The case was reassigned to Judge Diane J. Humetewa on July 2, 2014.

On July 11, 2014, the parties filed notice that they had reached a settlement. The proposed class settlement, filed with the court on Aug. 27, 2014, required Bashas' to pay $6.5 million "for class damages, administrative expenses, service awards to the named plaintiffs..., and attorneys’ fees and costs." From this fund, the settlement proposed to set up a $400,000 administrative cost fund to account for challenges associated with the duration of the litigation. Specifically, locating class members would be difficult because 90% of them were no longer employed at Food City and many of whom likely moved from the addresses on file to new homes, including Mexico and Central America. Further, the fact that many class members only spoke Spanish made communicating updates to them more difficult. Payouts to class members were to be determined on the basis of payroll records by calculating "the difference between his or her actual hours worked and hourly rates received at Food City, with the same number of hours at the hourly rates paid at Bashas’ and A.J.’s Fine Foods for the same time period." Further, if a class member did not qualify for a payout, the settlement provided a mechanism for disputing the determination. The settlement also provided for the possibility of a second round of distributions using residual funds after the first payout. Any funds left after these payouts were to be given to the University of Arizona Law School Immigrant Workers’ Clinic, the ASU Alumni Law Group, and Community Legal Services of Arizona.

The court approved the settlement on April 24, 2015 after a fairness hearing. The same day, the court granted attorneys’ fees of $1,625,000 and costs of $178,761.26.

The court dismissed the case with prejudice, but retained jurisdiction for the purposes of enforcing the settlement. The case is now closed.

Emma Bao - 07/18/2013
Virginia Weeks - 11/09/2017


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