The Fourth Circuit recently vacated a district court’s grant of class certification based on a lack of commonality and predominance. See Overby v. Anheuser-Busch, LLC, 2026 WL 1718962 (4th Cir. June 15, 2026). The plaintiffs sought to represent a class of hourly employees asserting claims based on allegations that their employer had a corporate policy of not compensating all mandatory pre- and post-shift work. The alleged uncompensated tasks included “donning/doffing PPE, complying with the COVID-19 health protocols, partaking in shift-handoff meetings, and securing and putting away tools.” The district court certified a class, but the Fourth Circuit reversed.
As the Fourth Circuit found, “significant variation in prospective class members’ alleged pre- and post-shift work” defeated class certification. Id. at *3. On this score, the Fourth Circuit faulted the district court’s formulation of the common question as impermissibly abstract “semantic gerrymandering.” Overby, 2026 WL 1718962, at *2. The Fourth Circuit zeroed in on three types of variation that prevented the common resolution of liability: “(1) whether class members performed specific categories of mandatory pre- or post-shift work at all, (2) where/when class members performed that off-shift work; and (3) what legal standards class members were subject to during the relevant employment periods.” Id. at *5. It further held that, by encompassing all hourly employees at the brewery with no exceptions, the overbroad class definition incorrectly presumed that all hourly workers who worked there during the relevant period had viable claims against the company. And this “overbreadth poses the unmistakable risk that ‘the district court may inadvertently be lump[ing] together a great many disparate plaintiffs with widely varying individual claims.’” Id. at *6.
Overby drives home the importance of developing a detailed factual record before certification to demonstrate variation among putative class members. The company was able to demonstrate variation by taking depositions of employees that showed their experiences varied so widely that liability could not be resolved uniformly for all of them. It further confirms how developing a detailed record lends greater force to arguments that a class has been defined so abstractly as to make liability a presumption rather than the question to be resolved.