The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to consider new limits on workers’ ability to collectively challenge pay and workplace issues under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).

The Roberts Court granted review in the case of Tyson Foods v. Bouaphakeo, a class action lawsuit against Tyson Foods Inc. over the pay of more than 3,000 employees at its Storm Lake, Iowa, pork processing plant. Peg Bouaphakeo, along with other Tyson employees challenged a series of practices, including Tyson’s refusal to provide overtime compensation for the time employees spent “donning (putting on) personal protective equipment (PPE)” and clothing before and again after lunch, and for doffing (removing) PPE and clothing before and after lunch.

The employees sued Tyson for failing to pay wages under the FLSA and Iowa Wage Payment Collection Law. A jury returned a verdict for the certified class of workers, ordering Tyson to pay $5.8 million in past wages and damages.

A federal appeals court affirmed the multimillion-dollar verdict against Tyson.

The Roberts Court on Monday agreed to step in and hear Tyson’s arguments that it should only have to defend against claims by workers who were injured by Tyson’s wage-and-hour violations, and not the entire certified class of workers in the lawsuit.

In other words, Tyson is not defending its actual labor practices but instead arguing the courts made a procedural error by allowing Bouaphakeo’s lawsuit to have been certified as a class action.

To support their petition for review to the Roberts Court, Tyson and other industry groups rely on the Roberts Court decision in Wal-Mart v. Dukes, a 2011 decision that revoked class action certification from what would have been one of the largest gender bias lawsuits of its kind. That decision significantly curtailed the scope of potential class action lawsuits under federal employment laws.

Industry groups hope to have similar success curtailing workers’ rights to bring class action lawsuits under the FSLA in Bouaphekeo. 

A decision in favor of Tyson could have a wide-reaching effect. Like pay discrimination cases, wage-and-hour lawsuits often involve individual damages claims that may not amount to a lot of money compared to the time and expense involved in prosecuting those claims. Class action lawsuits in which workers can aggregate their claims and money damages, however, give workers leverage in fighting against wage theft as the aggregated damages can add up to multimillion-dollar verdicts, as it did against Tyson in Bouaphakeo.

Monday’s decision to review the class-certification in Bouaphakeo may not be the only FLSA class action case the Roberts Court will hear next term.

The Court considered Bouaphakeo along with two other petitions, both filed by Walmart, challenging FLSA class action verdicts in Pennsylvania totaling more than $187 million. Despite considering the cases together, the Roberts Court on Monday took no action on the Walmart cases challenging class action certifications under the FLSA, which means the Court could be waiting to see how the arguments in Bouaphakeo unfold before deciding how broadly to review class action certification in wage theft claims.

A date for arguments in Tyson Foods v. Bouaphakeo has not yet been set.