United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit ____________________ No. 20-1030 RICHARD J. ANDERSON, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. WEINERT ENTERPRISES, INC., Defendant-Appellee. ____________________

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin. No. 1:18-cv-00901 — William C. Griesbach, Judge. ____________________

ARGUED SEPTEMBER 21, 2020 — DECIDED JANUARY 28, 2021 ____________________

Before WOOD, BRENNAN, and SCUDDER, Circuit Judges. SCUDDER, Circuit Judge. Ample ink has been spilled dis- cussing class action litigation and Federal Rule of Civil Proce- dure 23. Rare are the cases analyzing the Rule’s numerosity requirement. This is one of those cases. Richard Anderson worked in northeast Wisconsin for a lo- cal roofing company called Weinert Enterprises. Following a dispute with the company over how Weinert calculated 2 No. 20-1030 overtime wages, Anderson brought suit in federal court in Wisconsin. After his collective action under the Fair Labor Standards Act failed to attract enough employee support, An- derson withdrew the federal claim. But he still sought to pur- sue Wisconsin state law claims as a class action. The district court determined that Anderson’s proposed class would in- clude no more than 37 members and, after finding that joinder of those 37 members was not impracticable, denied the class certification motion for failing to meet Rule 23’s numerosity requirement. We affirm. I Richard Anderson worked as one of Weinert’s handful of seasonal employees. Although the company maintained a physical shop, employees worked mostly at job sites in the Green Bay area. Because employees sometimes lived closer to a job site than the shop, Weinert offered its employees the op- tion to drive on their own to the project location or to carpool from the shop using a company truck. If employees chose the company carpool, Weinert paid travel time at time-and-a-half the minimum wage rate. Because Weinert already paid travel time this way, it did not count travel time hours toward an employee’s 40-hour work week when calculating other over- time hours. For example, if an employee accumulated six hours of travel time and worked 40 hours at the job site, the employee would not receive any overtime pay for the job site work. This matters to Anderson because Weinert paid more than minimum wage for job site work, meaning overtime wages for job site work would be higher than what employees received for travel time. Anderson sued Weinert alleging that this policy violated the Fair Labor Standards Act and Wisconsin labor laws. No. 20-1030 3 Anderson initially sought to litigate his federal FLSA claim as a collective action, see 29 U.S.C. § 216(b). After only three other employees joined the action (only one of whom did so timely), Anderson moved for leave to amend his complaint and convert the collective action into an individual FLSA ac- tion, which in time settled. Having failed to generate enough support to sustain a col- lective action for his FLSA claim, Anderson focused his efforts on his state-law claims and certifying a class under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23. Anderson defined the proposed class as consisting of “[a]ll hourly employees who worked on the jobsite for the Defendant on or after June 14, 2016.” At the time he moved for class certification in April 2019, Anderson had identified 37 former or current Weinert em- ployees to include in the class. He also requested that the dis- trict court include all employees Weinert expected to hire for the 2019 season. The dist