June 24, 2026|Franchise Frontlines
June 24, 2026 | United States District Court for the District of South Carolina, Charleston Division | Slip Copy — Only the Westlaw citation is currently available (2026 WL 1815573)
Executive Summary
In a slip-copy order available only on Westlaw at 2026 WL 1815573, Judge David C. Norton of the United States District Court for the District of South Carolina granted in part and denied in part a motion for judgment on the pleadings brought by Dorchester County and the elected County Coroner, Paul Brouthers, in a wage-and-hour suit filed by three former deputy coroners on behalf of a putative class. Plaintiffs asserted an unpaid-overtime claim under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) against both defendants on a joint-employment theory, plus a South Carolina Payment of Wages Act (SCPWA) claim and a breach-of-contract claim tied to an alleged promise of additional pay upon certification. The County argued that, because South Carolina law withholds from counties any employment authority over the personnel of an elected official, it could not be Plaintiffs’ employer as a matter of law; the Coroner argued that the Eleventh Amendment barred the claims against him because he, in his official capacity, was the real party in interest. Plaintiffs countered that the state-law division of authority does not resolve the distinct FLSA joint-employment question and that their claims targeted the Coroner’s personal conduct. The court held that the Coroner, as an arm of the state, was entitled to Eleventh Amendment immunity and dismissed all claims against him; dismissed the SCPWA and contract claims against the County by Plaintiffs’ own consent; but denied judgment on the FLSA claim against the County, holding on this record that the County’s state-law argument was not tethered to the FLSA’s employer standard and that the County had waived any argument that joint employment was insufficiently pleaded by raising it only in reply.
Relevant Background
Plaintiffs Jerome Farris, Lorie Edie, and Pamela White served as deputies to the Dorchester County Coroner until February 2025. They allege that during their employment they regularly worked more than forty hours per week, rarely received a day off, and were expected to answer the Coroner’s telephone calls around the clock or face reprimand, and that the Coroner told them they “were never off work.” Plaintiffs further allege the Coroner promised to pay them between $3,000 and $5,000 upon their obtaining a certificate from the American Board of Legal Death Investigators, but that despite obtaining the certificates they were never paid. Plaintiffs contend the Coroner misclassified them as exempt from the FLSA’s overtime provisions.
Plaintiffs filed suit on July 14, 2025, asserting three causes of action against all defendants: an FLSA claim for unpaid overtime wages, an SCPWA claim, and a breach-of-contract claim, the latter two arising from the unpaid certification bonus. As to the County, Plaintiffs pleaded a joint-employment theory, alleging under a “Joint Employers” heading in the complaint that the County set the terms and conditions of employment, owned and operated the building where deputies worked, supplied vehicles, gas cards, equipment, and cell phones, required compliance with County vehicle policies, paid deputies’ salaries, provided benefits, and required random drug testing.
Defendants jointly moved for judgment on the pleadings under Rule 12(c) on February 10, 2026; briefing was completed and the court held a hearing on May 5, 2026. At the hearing, Plaintiffs’ counsel confirmed that Plaintiffs would forego their claims against the Coroner in his official capacity and consented to dismissing the SCPWA and breach-of-contract claims as to the County. That left the FLSA joint-employer claim against the County and the individual-capacity claims against the Coroner as the principal contested issues.
Decision
Applying the Rule 12(b)(6) plausibility standard that governs Rule 12(c) motions, the court first rejected the County’s threshold argument that state law made it impossible for the County to be Plaintiffs’ employer. The County relied on S.C. Code Ann. § 4-9-30(7), which withholds from a county’s “employment and discharge authority” any personnel “under the direction of an elected official,” and on Eargle v. Horry County, 545 S.E.2d 276 (S.C. 2001). The court held that this state-law limitation was not dispositive because it was “not tethered to the FLSA’s joint employment standard or even the FLSA’s statutory definition of an employer,” which broadly reaches “any person acting directly or indirectly in the interest of an employer in relation to an employee” under 29 U.S.C. § 203(d). Citing Salinas v. Commercial Interiors, Inc., 848 F.3d 125 (4th Cir. 2017), the court observed that “[a]n entity may constitute an employer for purposes of the FLSA even if it not an employer under other statutes,” and that the sole case the County cited finding a county was not an FLSA employer predated Salinas and rested on a summary-judgment record.
The court declined to resolve the joint-employment question on the Fourth Circuit’s six Salinas factors because the County had waived that argument. As the movant, the County bore the burden of showing that Plaintiffs failed to state a claim; yet its initial motion never argued that Plaintiffs had failed to plausibly plead joint employment and never identified the FLSA joint-employment standard, raising the Salinas factors only in reply. Invoking the “ordinary rule” that an argument raised for the first time in a reply brief will not be considered, the court deemed the argument waived. The court added, in the alternative, that even if it reached the factors it would still find a joint-employment relationship plausibly alleged at the pleadings stage, noting that an “in depth analysis of the Salinas factors is inappropriate at motion to dismiss stage.” It therefore denied judgment on the pleadings as to the FLSA claim against the County.
The court reached the opposite result for the Coroner. After Plaintiffs conceded their official-capacity claims, the court analyzed the surviving individual-capacity claims under the Eleventh Amendment. It first confirmed that the elected office of coroner is an “arm of the state,” reasoning that S.C. Const. art. V, § 24 establishes the coroner’s office and gives the General Assembly authority over it on the same terms as the office of sheriff, which Fourth Circuit and district precedent (Gulledge v. Smart, Cromer v. Brown, and Cone v. Nettles) treat as “more closely connected to the state than to the county.”
The court then applied the “real, substantial party in interest” framework of Martin v. Wood, 772 F.3d 192 (4th Cir. 2014), to determine whether the nominally individual-capacity claims were in substance official-capacity claims. Examining the substance of the complaint, the court weighed the five Martin factors: whether the alleged actions were tied inextricably to official duties; whether the burden of the desired relief would have been borne by the state; whether a judgment would be institutional and official in character; whether the official acted to further personal interests distinct from the state’s; and whether the actions were ultra vires. The court found that all but one factor — the second, because Plaintiffs alleged they were paid by the County rather than the state — favored treating the claims as official-capacity claims, because the Coroner’s alleged failure to authorize overtime and certification pay was inextricably tied to his official duties and the complaint alleged no personal interest or ultra vires conduct. Concluding that the Coroner was the real party in interest and an arm of the state, the court held the Eleventh Amendment barred the individual-capacity claims and granted him judgment on the pleadings on all claims.
Looking Forward
Although this dispute arose between deputy coroners and a county rather than within a franchise system, the court applied the Fourth Circuit’s Salinas joint-employment framework — the same multi-factor test franchisors face when a franchisee’s employees seek to reach the brand as a joint employer — and its reasoning may inform how courts approach analogous arguments. The central caution is that a formal, structural, or state-law division of employment authority does not, on this court’s reasoning, resolve the distinct federal joint-employment question. Just as the County could not rely on a state statute stripping it of authority over an elected official’s deputies to escape the FLSA inquiry, a franchisor should not assume that a franchise agreement’s allocation of employment responsibility to the franchisee, standing alone, will defeat a well-pleaded joint-employment claim at the pleadings stage; courts may treat the federal test as a separate question governed by the substance of the parties’ relationship.
The most transferable lesson is procedural and defense-side. The County lost its bid for early dismissal not only because its state-law theory was not tethered to the FLSA standard, but because it waived the governing joint-employment argument by omitting it from its opening motion and raising it only in reply. Employers and franchisors defending joint-employment claims would be well served to identify and argue the controlling federal factors squarely and completely in the initial motion, rather than reserving them behind a structural or immunity-based theory. On this court’s application, staking a Rule 12(c) motion on a single “as a matter of law” argument, while the movant bears the burden, risks both an adverse ruling on the theory raised and forfeiture of the argument most likely to succeed. Because the court also observed that an in-depth factor analysis is generally inappropriate at the pleadings stage, defendants should further weigh whether the joint-employment question is better developed on a summary-judgment record after discovery.
The immunity portion of the order offers a converse reminder. The Eleventh Amendment and arm-of-the-state defenses fully resolved the claims against the Coroner, but the denial as to the County illustrates that such defenses do not extend automatically to every related entity, and that a governmental employer’s structural argument may fail where a private or municipal co-employer’s does not. For franchisors, employers, and other multi-entity systems, the broader takeaway is that defeating a joint-employment claim may require engaging the federal test directly and early; on this record, reliance on organizational structure alone did not make the question disappear.
Thomas O’Connell is a Partner at Buchalter LLP and Chair of the firm’s Franchise Practice Group. For questions about this article or media inquiries, you can contact Tom at toconnell@buchalter.com.
This article is based solely on the opinion of the Court in this matter. The author has not conducted any independent investigation into the facts. For the avoidance of doubt, each statement related to the law and facts in this article is drawn from the Court’s opinion in this case. It was drafted with the assistance of an artificial intelligence system. AI systems can make mistakes, including in describing legal authority. Readers should independently confirm any legal authority before relying on it.
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