More than 40 injured truck drivers who claim their trucking company improperly forced them to live in another city for medical care and light-duty work don’t have enough “commonality” in their workers compensation cases for a class action, the Supreme Court of Iowa ruled Friday, vacating a lower court decision that certified the suit.

Anthony Roland, the first plaintiff in the suit and a resident of Oxford, Alabama, was working as a truck driver for Des Moines, Iowa-based Annett Holdings LLC, which requires all of its drivers as a condition of their employment to sign a memorandum of understanding that states that if they’re injured they may be required to temporarily relocate to Des Moines for modified duty work, according to documents in Anthony Roland v. Annett Holdings Inc., filed in Des Moines.

In 2014 Mr. Roland injured his elbow and was forced to seek treatment in Indianapolis, where the injury occurred, and then was relocated to Des Moines for modified work duty — more than 800 miles from his home. The company approved a request that needed surgery take place in his home state, along with recovery. Two weeks after surgery the company arranged for his physical therapy to be conducted in Des Moines, which prompted him to petition the Iowa Workers’ Compensation Commission seeking alternative care, which was eventually granted with the state comp commissioner concluding that the company’s memorandum of understanding “deprived Roland of reasonable medical care” and violated state law, documents state.

Mr. Roland eventually filed a lawsuit on behalf of himself and other drivers forced to receive care away from home, which a state appeals court in June 2019 certified as a class action.

Annett Holdings argued that “the drivers' claims involved too many individualized issues for class adjudication and that there is no private cause of action” under Iowa law, documents state.

The state’s highest court agreed, writing that in addition to finding that the “commonality requirement is lacking” in the cases, that the “reason class certification is inappropriate is that, apart from Roland, there is no evidence that any of the class members exhausted their administrative remedies.”

“The workers' compensation commissioner has exclusive jurisdiction over alleged violations of Iowa (workers comp code) requirements for alternate medical care, and the district court lacks subject matter jurisdiction over a civil action alleging statutory violations by an employee who failed to exhaust his administrative remedies,” the ruling states.