Carrasquillo-Ortiz v. American Airlines, Inc. , 825 F.3d 73 ( 2016 )

United States Court of Appeals
For the First Circuit
No. 15-1424
ELIZABETH CARRASQUILLO-ORTIZ; CARMEN GUZMÁN-VÁZQUEZ; DANIEL
OUVIÑA; VÍCTOR RIVERA; MATILDE RODRÍGUEZ-NOA; BRENDA ENID
VÁZQUEZ-DÍAZ; FRED VOLTAGGIO-DE JESÚS,
Plaintiffs, Appellants,
v.
AMERICAN AIRLINES, INC.,
Defendant, Appellee.
APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF PUERTO RICO
[Hon. Gustavo A. Gelpí, Jr., U.S. District Judge]
Before
Thompson, Hawkins,* and Barron,
Circuit Judges.
Alfredo Fernández-Martínez, with whom Delgado & Fernández,
LLC, was on brief, for appellants.
Juan Enjamio, with whom Hunton & Williams LLP was on brief,
for appellee.
June 9, 2016
* Of the Ninth Circuit, sitting by designation.
BARRON, Circuit Judge. This appeal concerns the proper
interpretation of Article 3 of Puerto Rico's Law No. 80 ("Law 80").
In January, we certified a question to the Supreme Court of Puerto
Rico to aid in our resolution of the case. We now have the Supreme
Court of Puerto Rico's response, and, on that basis, we affirm the
District Court.
To briefly recap, Article 3 requires companies that
operate in Puerto Rico to pay a statutory severance, called a
"mesada," to certain employees in Puerto Rico who are terminated
as part of a downsizing or restructuring when less senior employees
in their job category are permitted to remain. The plaintiffs are
former employees of defendant American Airlines, Inc.
("American"), who contend American owes them a mesada.
The parties agree that American owed the plaintiffs a
mesada only if American was required by Article 3 to compute
seniority within the plaintiffs' job category based on "all the
employees of the company, that is to say, taking into consideration
all of its offices," P.R. Laws Ann. tit. 29, § 185c(b), rather
than based on only employees in the same office as the employee
who has been terminated. And the parties agree that this method
of computing seniority applies only to companies "whose regular
and usual practice is to transfer its employees from one unit to
another." Id. Their key dispute is over whether American's
transfers between its lone Puerto Rico office and its offices in
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other jurisdictions count as relevant transfers for the purposes
of Article 3.
The District Court agreed with American that such
transfers did not count, and it therefore granted American's motion
for summary judgment. The District Court based this conclusion on
the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico's decision in Reyes Sánchez v.
Eaton Elec., 189 P.R. Dec. 586 (2013). There, the Supreme Court
of Puerto Rico stated that the analysis of employer transfer
activity under Article 3 of Law 80 "is limited to determining the
frequency of transfers of employees between the company's
establishments in the jurisdiction of Puerto Rico." Id. at 608(certified translation at 24).
This appeal then followed, and, after hearing argument
in November, we certified a question to the Supreme Court of Puerto
Rico in January regarding Reyes Sánchez. In our opinion certifying
the question, we noted that the statement in Reyes Sánchez on which
the District Court relied, standing alone, supported American's
position. Carrasquillo-Ortiz v. Am. Airlines, Inc., 812 F.3d 195,
197 (1st Cir. 2016). But, we explained, the defendant company in
Reyes Sánchez apparently1 operated only as a separate subsidiary
in Puerto Rico and thus made no transfers between an office in
Puerto Rico and an office outside of Puerto Rico that was part of
1 The plaintiffs have represented this to us throughout this
litigation, and American has never contested that representation.
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the same corporate entity. Id. at 197-98. American, by contrast,
operates as one corporate entity worldwide and so makes transfers
only within the same corporate entity. Id. We thus asked in our
certification request whether the Reyes Sánchez Court's statement
that the transfer analysis under Article 3 is limited to those
"between the company's establishments in the jurisdiction of
Puerto Rico," 189 P.R. Dec. at 608 (certified translation at 24)
applied "where the employer has one office in Puerto Rico and
multiple offices in other jurisdictions and operates all of its
offices under the same corporate entity." Carrasquillo-Ortiz, 812
F.3d at 200.
In a resolution issued on May 6, 2016, the Supreme Court
of Puerto Rico responded to our request by denying certification
on the ground that Reyes Sánchez "held that the scope of [Article
3] is limited to an analysis of personnel movements between an
enterprise's establishments in Puerto Rico and those made out of
the Commonwealth are not considered." Because this resolution
makes clear that the holding of Reyes Sánchez covers cases in which
the defendant employer operates as one corporate entity worldwide,
and because American has only one office in Puerto Rico, American
does not make transfers that could trigger the method for computing
seniority that would benefit the plaintiffs. Accordingly, Reyes
Sánchez requires that we affirm the District Court's grant of
summary judgment to American.
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