No. 22-1862 ___________________________

Torri M. Houston, Individually and on behalf of all others similarly situated

Plaintiff - Appellant

v.

Saint Luke’s Health System, Inc.; Saint Luke’s Northland Hospital Corporation

Defendants - Appellees

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Secretary of Labor

Amicus on Behalf of Appellant(s) ____________

Appeal from United States District Court for the Western District of Missouri - Kansas City ____________

Submitted: June 13, 2023 Filed: August 11, 2023 ____________ Before GRUENDER, ARNOLD, and KELLY, Circuit Judges. ____________ GRUENDER, Circuit Judge. Hourly employees of St. Luke’s Health System allege that they were underpaid over several years due to their employer’s timekeeping policy that rounded off time at the beginning and end of shifts. The district court granted summary judgment to St. Luke’s on all claims. We vacate and remand.

I.

St. Luke’s uses an automated timekeeping system. Employees clock in and out at the beginning and end of their shifts, and the system records the exact time. The system then applies a rounding policy. Clocked times within six minutes of a shift’s scheduled start or end get rounded to the scheduled time for compensation purposes. For example, an employee who clocks in at 8:56 a.m. for a 9:00 a.m. shift would not be paid for those four minutes. Likewise, an employee who clocks out early at 4:54 p.m. for a shift ending at 5:00 p.m. would still be paid for those unworked six minutes.

Torri Houston, a former employee, sued on behalf of herself and similarly situated employees, claiming that St. Luke’s violated the Fair Labor Standards Act’s (“FLSA”) overtime provisions by failing to fully compensate employees for work performed. See 29 U.S.C. § 207(a)(1); 29 C.F.R. § 778.103. She also brought an unjust-enrichment claim under state law. The district court certified two classes with different lookback periods: (1) an FLSA collective comprised of employees who worked for St. Luke’s between September 2016 and September 2018;1 and (2) an unjust-enrichment class comprised of all employees who worked for St. Luke’s in Missouri between April 2012 and September 2018. Houston also asserted individual claims, one under the Missouri Minimum Wage Law, Mo. Rev. Stat. § 290.527, and one for breach of her employment contract.

1 The FLSA authorizes collective actions, see 29 U.S.C. § 216(b), which are distinct from class actions governed by Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23.

-2- After limited yet substantial discovery, St. Luke’s moved for summary judgment. It stipulated, for the purposes of its motion, that all employee time “on the clock” was compensable work time and that issues about why employees clocked in early or clocked out late were immaterial. See Fed. R. Civ. P. 56(c)(1)(A).

Each side submitted expert reports analyzing the rounding policy’s effect on compensation. The employees’ expert, Scott Baggett, analyzed pay records across all six years of data on a per-shift basis, a per-workweek basis, a per-employee basis, and overall. The St. Luke’s expert, Deborah Foster, also analyzed pay records on a per-shift and per-employee basis but did so separately for three lookback periods. The parties agree that any minor differences in the data evaluated or in the conclusions reached by the reports are immaterial for summary judgment.

The reports show that the r