That's the lesson from the 4th Circuit's recent decision in Overby v. Anheuser-Busch, where the court vacated certification of a Virginia wage-and-hour class alleging employees weren't paid for mandatory pre- and post-shift work.
The case involved hourly employees at Anheuser-Busch's Williamsburg brewery. Employees claimed they performed a variety of unpaid activities outside their scheduled shifts, including donning and doffing personal protective equipment, complying with COVID-era screening protocols, attending shift-handoff meetings, and putting away tools. The district court certified a class of essentially all hourly brewery employees, concluding that the central question was whether Anheuser-Busch had a policy of paying only scheduled shift time despite requiring additional work.
The 4th Circuit wasn't buying it.
The court's opinion builds on its 2024 decision in Stafford v. Bojangles' Restaurants, which warned courts against defining common questions at too high a level of abstraction. According to Judge Wilkinson, broad formulations like "Did the company fail to pay employees for required work?" sound common, but they often conceal the very differences that make class treatment inappropriate.
And there were lots of differences here.
Some employees participated in shift-handoff meetings. Others didn't. Some employees wore certain PPE at home before arriving at work. Others changed at the brewery. Some employees worked during the COVID-screening period. Others were hired after those protocols ended. Some workers were governed by one version of Virginia's wage laws, while others were subject to a materially different statutory framework after legislative amendments took effect in 2022.
Those distinctions mattered because liability couldn't be determined with a single answer applicable to everyone. Instead, the court saw a case that would devolve into a series of employee-by-employee inquiries about what work was performed, where it was performed, when it was performed, and whether it was legally compensable.
That's poison for Rule 23's commonality and predominance requirements.
For employers, this decision reinforces an increasingly important trend in class-action jurisprudence. Courts are becoming less willing to certify sweeping workplace classes based solely on generalized allegations of companywide policies. Instead, they are demanding evidence that liability can actually be determined through common proof.
That's especially significant in off-the-clock cases. While plaintiffs often frame these lawsuits around a single alleged policy, the underlying facts frequently vary from employee to employee, department to department, location to location, and even shift to shift.
The 4th Circuit's message is straightforward: courts must look beneath the label of a "common policy" and examine whether the employees' actual experiences are sufficiently similar to justify collective treatment. If answering the liability question requires hundreds of mini-trials, class certification is likely off the table.
Employers should take note. A well-developed factual record showing differences in job duties, work practices, locations, schedules, and compensation procedures can be a powerful weapon against class certification. Overby demonstrates that even where employees allege a common wage-and-hour violation, meaningful variations among workers may be enough to keep the case from proceeding as a class action.
Class actions remain an important tool for addressing widespread workplace violations. But as the 4th Circuit reminded everyone in Overby, a common-policy allegation is not enough to certify a class if the underlying facts aren't common too.