SUMMARY

• 4th Circuit ruled district court wrongly applied but-for causation, not FSMA‘s contributing factor standard.
• Finley’s escalating food safety complaints may have affected his termination despite alleged dishonesty.
• Evidence of comparator and retaliation disputes remain genuine issues for jury consideration.
• Case remanded for district court to assess protected activity and causation under proper standard.

A district court erroneously analyzed a whistleblower‘s wrongful termination complaint using a but-for causation framework, rather than the more generous contributing factor standard under the Food Safety Modernization Act, or FSMA, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has held.

Rather than consider all the evidence to determine whether a reasonable jury could side with the claimant, the district court granted summary judgment to the employer based on its explanation that the claimant was fired for dishonesty, not his protected activity.

Judge Pamela A. Harris said the district court erred because the claimant’s conduct during the investigation “should be considered not in isolation, but in conjunction with [the claimant’s] evidence of contributing factor causation.”

“We hold only that a reasonable jury could infer from the record, considered as a whole, that something more than [Wilbert] Finley’s alleged ‘dishonesty’ on March 24 contributed to his firing by Kraft Heinz, and that Finley’s increasingly urgent food safety complaints — culminating immediately...

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