Why Garland Deserves a SCOTUS Hearing

by Deacon Blues

All you need to know about the outright bias Supreme Court justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have for companies against their workers was on full display today in a class action case found in favor of the workers at a Tyson Foods pork processing plant.

In a 6-2 decision for the workers, who were suing Tyson for uncompensated wages and overtime for time taken to put on and take off protective clothing, Justice Anthony Kennedy noted that the workers had presented credible statistical evidence of the estimated time it took workers to put on and take off the protective gear. As Kennedy noted, the workers had to do this because Tyson itself had no such records of the time they were requiring workers to do this for free.

Yet in their dissent, our intrepid, Dickensian justices Thomas and Alito said this was unfair.

In dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., said that approach “puts employers to an untenable choice."

“They must either track any time that might be the subject of an innovative lawsuit,” Justice Thomas wrote, “or they must defend class actions against representative evidence that unfairly homogenizes an individual issue.”

Did I mention that Tyson had no records to rebut the workers' credible estimates? Yet the lack of records was enough for both Thomas and Alito to find against the workers. According to Thomas and Alito, every employer could escape damages by simply and intentionally refusing to keep records.

Yes, these are the high-caliber justices that the GOP wants more of on the nation's highest court.