Mosley v. General Motors Corp.
United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit
497 F.2d 1330 (1974)
Mosley and nine others (plaintiffs) alleged that their employer, General Motors (defendant), and their union discriminated against them based on color and race, and after each obtained an EEOC reasonable-cause finding and right-to-sue notice, they sued individually and as class representatives alleging a company-wide discriminatory policy against black and female employees. On General Motors's motion, the district court severed the first ten of twelve alleged counts into separate individual actions rather than allowing joinder, reasoning no common question of law or fact existed among the plaintiffs beyond all suing the same employer, and the plaintiffs took an interlocutory appeal.
Whether, in a class action employment discrimination case, individual plaintiffs' claims may be joined in a single action, even if individual class members have suffered different effects from the alleged discrimination.