EEOC v. Port Auth. of N.Y. & N.J.

EEOC v. Port Auth. of N.Y. & N.J., 768 F.3d 247 (2d Cir. 2014). A discrimination complaint will be dismissed for failure to state a claim under Twombly and Iqbal pleading standards when the complaint alleges conclusory facts that simply overlap in titles or classifications rather than establish nonconclusory facts such as common duties or content that will move the claim across the line from conceivable to plausible. The appellant, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ("EEOC"), brought action against the appellee, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey ("Port Authority"), claiming that Port Authority violated the Equal Pay Act (EPA) by paying its female nonsupervisory attorneys at a lesser rate than their male counterparts for what the EEOC alleged was "equal work." Specifically, the EEOC alleged that female attorneys were subject to the same educational, training, experience, and ability requirements as male attorneys, female and male attorneys had the same job code, evaluations were conducted under the same criteria for both male and female attorneys, and that all salary ranges were determined by the same formula. To prove an EPA violation, the plaintiff must demonstrate (1) that the employer pays different wages to employees of the opposite sex; (2) that the employees perform equal work on jobs requiring equal skill, effort, and responsibility; and (3) that the jobs are performed under similar working conditions. Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, 29 U.S.C. § 206(d)(1) (2014). Although a plaintiff need not establish that her job is identical to a higher-paid position, the standard requires evidence that the jobs that are being compared are "substantially equal," or share common duties or content. Id. This appeal followed from the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York granting judgment in favor of Port Authority's motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim because the EEOC had not alleged a single nonconclusory fact supporting its assertion that the claimants and comparators jobs required "substantially equal" skill and effort. Thus, the EEOC's allegations did not rise to the level of facial plausibility. Instead, the EEOC asserted generalized facts consistent with all attorneys to establish that the male and female attorneys' jobs were substantially equal, such as having the same professional degree, working under time constraints and deadlines, using analytical and legal skills, determining their salaries by the same formula, that males and females were required to have the same experience, training, education, and ability, and that they were evaluated by the same criteria. However, these claims were insufficient to demonstrate a violation of the EPA because they were based on job titles and criteria instead of actual job requirements and performance. Moreover, the use of evaluative criteria speaks to a breadth of standards being used, and not to the issue of whether the attorneys being evaluated had varying workplace demands. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit commented that accepting such sweeping generalizations as adequate to state a claim under the EPA might permit lawsuits against any law firm-or, conceivably, any type of employer- that does not employ a lockstep pay model. Without more, these facts could not be read to raise the EEOC's "substantially equal" work claim "above the speculative level." Nonconclusory facts describing actual job requirements and performance, and common job duties and content are desired instead to raise a claim above the speculative level. The Second Circuit went on to distinguish that this holding is only applicable to cases where a single claimant wishes to claim that she performed "substantially equal" work compared to a higherpaid co-worker of the opposite sex but only asserts conclusory facts. (Brooke Pollard)