Pacific Seafood and other crab buyers will face price-fixing claims after a magistrate judge denied their motion to dismiss a suit filed on behalf of 1,400 Dungeness crabbers in California, Washington and Oregon.

Magistrate Judge Alex G. Tse of the US District Court for the Northern District of California in a Jan. 17 order said the plaintiffs plausibly alleged a price-fixing agreement in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act, which prohibits agreements that restrain trade.

Courts categorically condemn horizontal price-fixing agreements “of the kind pleaded here, in which competitors ‘agree to charge the same prices,’” Tse said.

Tse’s order moves forward a proposed class action first brought by crabbers in 2023, alleging Pacific Seafood, headquartered in Oregon, illegally fixed the price paid to crabbers for Dungeness crab landed in the Pacific Northwest.

Plaintiff crabbers claim their pay was suppressed by middlemen buyers who sold the crab they caught further along the supply chain and took an enormous, unearned portion of their profits.

The judge’s decision “bodes very well for plaintiffs’ ultimate success,” plaintiffs’ attorney Stuart Gross of Gross Klein PC said. “We’ll get a case schedule set and engage in discovery and move on to litigating the case as needed.”

The magistrate judge in May 2023 rejected plaintiffs’ claims that Pacific Seafood held monopsony power — in which a company is the sole buyer of an entire market.

The plaintiffs dropped the monopsony claims in an amended complaint last year and focused instead on allegations that Pacific Seafood, along with major buyers of Dungeness crab, fixed the price paid to crabbers.

The allegations included text messages in which buyers indicated that Pacific Seafood would set the price for Dungeness crab.

The defendant buyers argued that the proposed class period — from Jan. 1, 2016, to now — covers claims barred by the antitrust statute of limitations and that tolling doesn’t apply.

Tse disagreed, saying the court didn’t need to consider the length of the class period now.

“What matters on a motion to dismiss is whether the named plaintiffs have pled timely claims, which they have,” he said.

Tse said in his order that the only defendants not plausibly implicated in the conspiracy are South Bend Products based in South Bend, Swanes Seafood Holding Co. of South Bend, and Ocean King Fish Inc. of California.

An attorney for Pacific Seafoods didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.