Brandon King v. United Parcel Service, et al.

Des Moines, Iowa, employment law lawyer represented the Plaintiff who sued job discrimination theory.



Brandon King ended up in federal court because he did not want to work on

Saturdays. The district court1 denied his motion to remand the case to state court

and granted judgment on the pleadings to his employer, United Parcel Service, Inc.



Not all UPS drivers follow the same schedule. King believed that the

company hired him to be a Monday-to-Friday driver but then pulled a bait-and-

switch by having him drive on Tuesdays through Saturdays instead. Working on

weekends had bothered him for a long time, which is why he repeatedly tried to get

out of it. For a while, his strategy was to maximize his weekday hours to avoid

weekend deliveries. Other times, he asked coworkers to trade shifts or split routes.

Some Saturdays he just called in sick. In short, he went to great lengths to avoid

them.



Eventually, UPS lost patience. It disciplined him in various ways, from

writing him up to having a supervisor ride along on deliveries. The company even

fired him more than once, only for the union to get his job back.

King accuses UPS of race and age discrimination, the creation of a hostile

work environment, and retaliation. For support, he alleges that UPS lets younger,

white employees avoid Saturday shifts and does not discipline them as harshly for

similar misconduct. He filed the suit in state court under the Iowa Civil Rights Act.

See Iowa Code §§ 216.6(1)(a), 11(2).



Federal court was the next stop, however, after UPS removed it. As relevant

here, its theory was that the Labor Management Relations Act (LMRA) completely

preempted King's state claims. In its view, deciding them would require an

interpretation of the company's collective-bargaining agreement, which necessarily

raised a federal question and wholly displaced his state claims, even though he had

cut the references to it in his amended complaint. See Boldt v. N. States Power Co.,

904 F.3d 586, 589–90 (8th Cir. 2018). For that reason, the district court refused to

remand the case to state court.



From there, the district court granted UPS's motion for judgment on the

pleadings. Although federal law had displaced nearly all his state claims, King had

repeatedly refused to allege an LMRA violation—the only claim that could work—

in his complaint. For others, he had failed to state a claim. We review both the

refusal to remand and the grant of judgment on the pleadings de novo. See

Krakowski v. Allied Pilots Ass'n, 973 F.3d 833, 836 (8th Cir. 2020) (explaining that

whether a district court "correctly applied the [complete-preemption] doctrine

presents an issue of law”); Phipps v. FDIC, 417 F.3d 1006, 1010 (8th Cir. 2005)

("We review the district court's denial of a motion to remand and its dismissal of the

complaint on grounds of preemption under a de novo standard.” (citation omitted))

Affirmed