delivered the opinion of the Court.
The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN Act or Act), 102 Stat. 890, 29 U. S. C. §2101
et seq.,
obligates certain employers to give workers or their union
*546
60 days’ notice before a plant closing or mass layoff. If an employer fails to give the notice, the employees may sue for backpay for each day of the violation, and, in the alternative, the union is ostensibly authorized to sue on their behalf. See
North Star Steel Co.
v.
Thomas,
Permitting a union to sue under the Act on behalf of its employee-members raises a question of standing. In
Hunt
v.
Washington State Apple Advertising Comm’n,
The questions presented here are whether, in enacting the WARN Act, Congress intended to abrogate this otherwise applicable standing limitation so as to permit the union to sue for damages running to its workers, and, if it did, whether it had the constitutional authority to do so. We answer yes to each question.
t — I
On January 17, 1992, respondent Brown Shoe Company wrote to a representative of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, stating that Brown Shoe would shut down its Dixon, Missouri, plant and permanently lay off 277 employees beginning on March 20, 1992. App. 62-63. The complaint filed by petitioner United Food and *547 Commercial Workers Union Local 751 charged that Brown Shoe’s representations were false insofar as they are relevant here, and that in fact, even before sending the letter, Brown Shoe had begun the layoffs, which continued through February and into March. App. 8-9. 1 The union accordingly claimed a violation of the WARN Act and sought the statutory remedy of 60-days’ backpay for each of its affected members.
The District Court dismissed the complaint under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6), saying that “when an organization seeks to recover monetary relief on behalf of its members, courts have found that such claims necessarily require participation of individual members in the suit.”
*548 II
At the outset, Brown Shoe argues that the WARN Act grants a union no authority to sue for damages on behalf of its members. Because the question on which we granted certiorari (whether Congress has the constitutional authority to alter the third prong of the associational standing enquiry) assumes that the WARN Act does grant the union such authority, Brown Shoe urges us to declare the writ of certiorari improvidently granted. In
North Star Steel,
however, we noted, contrary to Brown Shoe’s position, that “[t]he class of plaintiffs” who may sue for backpay under the WARN Act “includes aggrieved employees (or their unions, as representatives).”
The key requirement of the Act is found in § 2102, which prohibits an employer from ordering “a plant closing or mass layoff until the end of a 60-day period” running from the date of the employer’s written notice of the closing or layoff “(1) to each representative of the affected employees as of the time of the notice or, if there is no such representative at that time, to each affected employee,” and “(2) to the State dislocated worker unit... and the chief elected official of the unit of local government within which such closing or layoff is to occur.” 29 U. S. C. § 2102(a). Congress defined the “representative” to which § 2102(a)(1) refers as the employees’ union, “an exclusive representative of employees within the meaning of section 9(a) or 8(f) of the National Labor Relations Act (29 U. S. C. 159(a), 158(f)) or section 2 of the Railway Labor Act (45 U. S. C. 152).” 102 Stat. 890, 29 U. S. C. § 2101(a)(4).
Enforcement of the § 2102 notice requirement is addressed in § 2104(a), the following provisions of which answer Brown Shoe’s argument. Section 2104(a)(1) makes a violating employer liable to “each aggrieved employee” for backpay and *549 benefits for each day of the violation. 3 Section 2104(a)(5) provides that “[a] person seeking to enforce such liability, including a representative of employees ... aggrieved under paragraph (1) . . . , may sue either for such person or for other persons similarly situated, or both, [in an appropriate district court].”
Since the union is the “representative of employees . . . aggrieved,” it is a person who may sue on behalf of the “persons similarly situated” in order to “enforce such liability.” “[S]uch liability” must refer to liability under §2104, since its remedies are exclusive. See 29 U. S. C. § 2104(b). Because the section makes no provision for liability to the union itself, any “such liability” sought by the union must (so far as concerns us here) be liability to its employee-members, so long as they can be understood to be “persons similarly situated” for the purposes of the Act. We believe they may be so understood, since each is aggrieved by the employer’s failure to give timely notice.
Brown Shoe’s alternative construction is unconvincing. It contends that a previous bill would have imposed civil liability on employers who failed to notify the union of a plant *550 closing or mass layoff, and would have permitted the union to sue to recover a penalty where an employer failed to provide the required notice. See S. 538, 100th Cong., 1st Sess. (1987). In the ultimately enacted version of the legislation, Congress eliminated this provision, with the result that the WARN Act no longer speaks to the “rights and welfare of unions,” Brief for Respondent 12. Brown Shoe’s argument is that the class of persons “similarly situated” is the class entitled to sue for damages, so that the elimination of the union’s entitlement to a civil penalty requires the conclusion that the union is no longer “similarly situated” to “employees . . . aggrieved under paragraph (1),” and thus not permitted to sue under the Act.
The flaw in this argument is that it would force us to conclude that the provision for suits by unions is attributable only to congressional inadvertence, whereas inadvertence is not the only possible, or even plausible, explanation for the authorization. For one, the statutory reference to persons “similarly situated” can very readily be understood to mean the class of persons to whom notice is owed but not given. In this respect, the union and its members are certainly persons “similarly situated.” Brown Shoe’s argument also fails to explain why Congress would necessarily have intended to eliminate the union’s power to sue on behalf of members (as Brown Shoe assumes the union could have done prior to the amendment) just because the union was no longer entitled to a penalty in its own right. The argument for Brown Shoe’s preferred construction simply rests on one speculative possibility in opposing a straightforward reading of the provision that a union may bring suit on behalf of its members, who are “employees ... aggrieved under paragraph (1).” Speculation loses, for the more natural reading of the statute’s text, which would give effect to all of its provisions, always prevails over a mere suggestion to disregard or ignore duly enacted law as legislative oversight.
*551 HH HH HH
This brings us to the primary question m the case: whether the union has standing to bring this action on behalf of its members.
4
Article III of the Constitution limits the federal judicial power to “Cases” or “Controversies,” thereby entailing as an “irreducible minimum” that there be (1) an injury in fact, (2) a causal relationship between the injury and the challenged conduct, and (3) a likelihood that the injury will be redressed by a favorable decision. See,
e. g., Northeastern Fla. Chapter, Associated Gen. Contractors of America
v.
Jacksonville,
A
The notion that an organization might have standing to assert its members’ injury has roots in
NAACP
v.
Alabama ex rel. Patterson,
The modern doctrine of associational standing, under which an organization may sue to redress its members’ injuries, even without a showing of injury to the association itself, emerges from a trilogy of cases. We first squarely recognized an organization’s standing to bring such a suit in
Warth
v.
Seldin,
“The association must allege that its members, or any one of them, are suffering immediate or threatened injury as a result of the challenged action of the sort that would make out a justiciable case had the members themselves brought suit. . . . [S]o long as the nature of the claim and of the relief sought does not make the individual participation of each injured party indispensable to proper resolution of the cause, the association may be an appropriate representative of its members, entitled to invoke the court’s jurisdiction.” Id., at 511.
Worth’s requirements for associational standing were elaborated in Hunt. There we held that the Washington State Apple Advertising Commission, a state agency whose statutory charge was to promote the State’s apple industry, had standing to bring a dormant Commerce Clause challenge to a North Carolina statute forbidding the display of Washington *553 State apple grades on apple containers. Relying on Warth, the Hunt Court stated a three-prong associational standing test:
“[W]e have recognized that an association has standing to bring suit on behalf of its members when: (a) its members would otherwise have standing to sue in their own right; (b) the interests it seeks to protect are germane to the organization’s purpose; and (c) neither the claim asserted nor the relief requested requires the participation of individual members in the lawsuit.”432 U. S., at 343 .
Finally, in
Automobile Workers
v.
Brock, 477
U. S. 274 (1986), we held that a union had standing to challenge an agency’s construction of a statute providing benefits to workers who lost their jobs because of competition from imports. The union there did not allege any injury to itself, nor was it argued that the members’ associational rights were affected. Reaffirming and applying the three-part test emerging from
Warth
and
Hunt,
we held that the union had standing to bring the suit.
B
The Court of Appeals here concluded that the union’s members would have had standing to sue on their own (the first prong), and recognized that the interests the union sought to protect were germane to its purpose (the second prong). But it denied the union’s claim of standing because it found that the relief sought by the union, damages on behalf of its members, would require the participation of individual members in the lawsuit.
One court has suggested that this bar is of constitutional magnitude, see
National Assn. of Realtors
v.
National Real Estate Assn., Inc.,
C
Although
Warth
noted that the test’s first requirement, that at least one of the organization’s members would have standing to sue on his own, is grounded on Article III as an element of “the constitutional requirement of a case or
*555
controversy,”
Warth, supra,
at 511, our cases have not otherwise clearly disentangled the constitutional from the prudential strands of the associational standing test. Cf.
Valley Forge Christian College
v.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Inc.,
There are two ways in which
Hunt
addresses the Article III requirements of injury in fact, causal connection to the defendant’s conduct, and redressability. First and most obviously, it guarantees the satisfaction of these elements by requiring an organization suing as representative to include at least one member with standing to present, in his or her own right, the claim (or the type of claim) pleaded by the association. As
Hunt’s
most direct address to Article III standing, this first prong can only be seen as itself an Article III necessity for an association’s representative suit. Cf.
Simon
v.
Eastern Ky. Welfare Rights Organization,
Circumstantial evidence of the prudential nature of this requirement is seen in the wide variety of other contexts in which a statute, federal rule, or accepted common-law practice permits one person to sue on behalf of another, even where damages are sought. “ [Representative damages litigation is common — from class actions under Fed. R. Civ. R 23(b)(3) to suits by trustees representing hundreds of creditors in bankruptcy to
parens patriae
actions by state governments to litigation by and against executors of decedents’ estates.”
In re Oil Spill by the Amoco Cadiz off the Coast of France on Mar. 16, 1978,
D
Because Congress authorized the union to sue for its members’ damages, and because the only impediment to that suit is a general limitation, judicially fashioned and prudentially imposed, there is no question that Congress may abrogate the impediment. As we noted in
Warth,
prudential limitations are rules of “judicial self-governance” that “Congress may remove ... by statute.”
* * *
The judgment of the Court of Appeals is reversed, and the case is remanded for proceedings consistent with this opinion.
It is so ordered.
Notes
Because the District Court dismissed the complaint, for the purposes of deciding this appeal we assume the truth of this allegation. Nor do we reach the merits of, or any other issue about, the union’s further complaint that Brown Shoe’s letter was defective because it was sent to an individual who worked for the International. The complaint alleges that United Food Local 751, not the International or its employee, is the exclusive representative of the affected employees and is thus statutorily entitled to notice of the closing and mass layoff.
The District Court had also denied the union’s motion to amend its complaint to add employees as plaintiffs. App. to Pet. for Cert. 18a-19a. The Court of Appeals held that the District Court’s decision in this respect did not represent an abuse of its discretion.
102 Stat. 893, as set forth in 29 U. S. C. § 2104(a)(1):
“Any employer who orders a plant closing or mass layoff in violation of section 2102 of this title shall be liable to each aggrieved employee who suffers an employment loss as a result of such closing or layoff for—
“(A) back pay for each day of violation at a rate of compensation not less than the higher of—
“(i) the average regular rate received by such employee during the last 3 years of the employee’s employment; or
“(ii) the final regular rate received by such employee; and
“(B) benefits under an employee benefit plan . . ., including the cost of medical expenses incurred during the employment loss which would have been covered under an employee benefit plan if the employment loss had not occurred.
“Such liability shall be calculated for the period of the violation, up to a maximum of 60 days, but in no event for more than one-half the number of days the employee was employed by the employer.”
The union also argues that it has standing because it suffered direct injury. The Court of Appeals held that the union lacked standing to assert its direct injury because neither backpay to the employees nor its “catch-all prayer for relief” would redress the union’s injury.
United Food argues that “given the simplified nature of the monetary relief here provided,” Brief for Petitioner 44, n. 17, the third prong of the Hunt test is satisfied despite its claim for damages. In light of our conclusion that in the WARN Act Congress has abrogated the third prong of the associational standing test, we need not decide here whether, absent congressional action, the third prong would bar a “simplified” claim for damages.
Because the union is statutorily entitled to receive notice under the WARN Act, and because of the paramount role, under federal labor law, that unions play in protecting the interests of their members, it is clear that this test is satisfied here. We therefore need not decide whether this prong is prudential in the sense that Congress may definitively declare that a particular relation is sufficient.
The germaneness of a suit to an association’s purpose may, of course, satisfy a standing requirement without necessarily rendering the association’s representation adequate to justify giving the association’s suit pre-clusive effect as against an individual ostensibly represented. See generally
Phillips Petroleum Co.
v.
Shutts,
See,
e. g., Whitmore
v.
Arkansas,
See, e. g., Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 78 Stat. 253, as amended, 42 U. S. C. § 2000e et seq., and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, 52 Stat. 1060, as amended, 29 U. S. C. § 201 et seq.