Tyson Foods, Inc. v. Bouaphakeo, 577 U.S. ___ (2016), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court affirmed the decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, which held that representative evidence could be used to support the claims of the class. The case arose as a class action lawsuit against Tyson Foods. The Supreme Court affirmed the Eighth Circuit's judgment that the class satisfied the predominance requirement of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure's Rule 23 and that the use of representative evidence was allowable in this case. It has been cited by lower courts and has spawned significant academic discussion. Background Employees brought suit in federal district court against Tyson Foods for violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and the Iowa Wage Payment Collection Law. The employees worked in an Iowa pork processing plant in the cut and retrim and kill departments. As part of their work, the employees needed to wear protective gear, and the FLSA required for them to be compensated for time spent doing things "integral and indispensable" to their work. The employees claimed that the time spent putting on and taking off their protective gear, "donning and doffing," met the standard and that Tyson Foods should have been paying them for the time that they did so. Instead, Tyson Foods compensated some employees for four to eight minutes of that activity and others for none at all. The employees sought to certify their class under Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Tyson Foods argued that the class should not be certified because of the individual variance in the employees' protective gear. The district court held that there were sufficiently-common questions to certify the class, such as whether the donning and doffing qualified as work under the FLSA. The case was tried and went to a jury, which had to decide whether the donning and doffing qualified as work and how much time that took but was not paid for by Tyson Foods. The claims were based on overtime work and so only employees who, after including donning and doffing time, worked more than forty hours per week would be able to recover. However, Tyson Foods did not keep records of the time that employees spent to put on and take off their protective gear. The employees, therefore, relied on their statements, videos