California employment case index

Tilly’s required retail workers to phone the store exactly two hours before every on-call shift — under threat of written discipline — and paid nothing if the answer was ‘don’t come in.’ Division Three held, 2–1, that this triggers Wage Order 7 reporting-time pay: ‘reporting for work’ means presenting oneself as ordered, and the employer’s own directions define the manner, whether that is walking through the door, logging on remotely, or making a mandatory call. The holding is deliberately tied to the two-hour call-in regime, the retroactivity question was expressly left open, and Justice Egerton’s partial dissent — built on 18,000 pages of IWC history — supplies the employer playbook. Review was denied; Ward remains the leading California authority on call-in scheduling.

Troester v. Starbucks Corp. (2018) 5 Cal.5th 829 holds that California has not adopted the federal de minimis doctrine: an employer that requires small but regularly recurring off-the-clock work — here, several minutes of closing tasks each shift — must pay for that time and cannot invoke de minimis to avoid it.

Dynamex Operations West, Inc. v. Superior Court (2018) 4 Cal.5th 903 adopts the “ABC test” for California wage-order claims: a worker is presumed an employee, and the hiring entity must prove all three prongs — freedom from control, work outside the usual course of business, and an independently established trade — to establish independent-contractor status.

For a flat-sum bonus like the attendance bonus here, the bonus is divided by the number of non-overtime (straight-time) hours the employee actually worked — not by total hours including overtime — to determine the per-hour value added to the regular rate; this yields a higher overtime rate, more protective than the…

Augustus v. ABM Security Services, Inc. (2016) 2 Cal.5th 257 holds that a compliant rest period must be free of both duties and employer control: an employer may not require employees to remain “on call” during a rest break, even if interruptions rarely occur.

Government Code section 12965(b) governs both fee and cost awards in FEHA actions and makes them discretionary under the asymmetric Christiansburg standard: a prevailing plaintiff ordinarily recovers fees and costs, but a prevailing defendant may recover them only if the action was objectively frivolous, unreasonable,…

Mendiola v. CPS Security Solutions, Inc. (2015) 60 Cal.4th 833 holds that security guards’ required on-call time at their worksites was compensable “hours worked” under the control clause, and that California’s Wage Order 4 — unlike federal law — does not permit excluding sleep time from compensable hours on a 24-hour shift.

An employer satisfies the minimum-earnings prong of the commissioned-employee exemption only in those pay periods in which it actually pays the required minimum earnings; it may not attribute commission wages paid in one pay period to other pay periods to manufacture compliance (59 Cal.4th at p. 664).

In Salas v. Sierra Chemical Co. (2014) 59 Cal.4th 407, a production worker who had obtained his job with a false Social Security number sued under FEHA for disability discrimination and retaliation; after litigation began, the employer discovered the fraud and won summary judgment on after-acquired-evidence and unclean-hands theories. The California Supreme Court reversed. It held that Senate Bill No. 1818 (Gov. Code § 7285; Civ. Code § 3339; Lab. Code § 1171.5) extends FEHA's remedies to workers “regardless of immigration status,” and that federal immigration law (IRCA, as read in Hoffman Plastic) does not preempt those state remedies except as to lost-pay damages for the period after the employer discovers the worker's ineligibility. Neither after-acquired evidence nor unclean hands is a complete defense; both bear on the remedy, not on liability.

Duran v. U.S. Bank National Assn. (2014) 59 Cal.4th 1 holds that a class-action trial plan using statistical or representative proof must still let the defendant litigate its affirmative defenses. A plan that extrapolated liability for 260 employees from a flawed 21-person sample and barred defense evidence violated due process.

Rest periods must be separately compensated and cannot be folded into a piece-rate or activity-based pay formula; because Safeway’s uniform pay system did not separately pay for rest periods, common issues predominated and the class should have been certified (216 Cal.App.4th at p. 866).

Piece-rate employees are entitled to separate hourly compensation for time spent waiting for repair work or performing other nonrepair tasks directed by the employer during their work shifts; piece-rate earnings cannot be averaged across that nonproductive time to satisfy the minimum-wage obligation (215 Cal.App.4th…

Neither Labor Code section 1194 nor section 218.5 authorizes an award of attorney fees to a party that prevails on a section 226.7 claim; such claims are not actions for the nonpayment of minimum wages or overtime (§1194) and are not the kind of nonpayment-of-wages action that triggers §218.5 fee-shifting, so each…

Brinker Restaurant Corp. v. Superior Court (2012) 53 Cal.4th 1004 is California’s foundational meal-and-rest decision: an employer must provide a duty-free meal period but need not ensure no work is done; it sets the meal-timing and rest-period rules and confirms that courts may resolve merits questions enmeshed with class certification.

Courts may not treat the administrative/production worker dichotomy as a dispositive test for the administrative exemption; the exemption must be analyzed under the language of the applicable IWC wage order and governing regulations, considering the actual work performed, rather than a rigid dichotomy.

Section 203(b) contains a single, three-year limitations period governing all actions for section 203 penalties, regardless of whether the penalty claim is accompanied by a claim for unpaid final wages; and the penalties may be recovered even though the underlying wages were eventually paid.

A trial court has discretion to deny or reduce a FEHA fee award when the plaintiff’s recovery is modest and the case could have been litigated as a limited civil case; where the fees sought are grossly disproportionate to a minor recovery (here, the judgment could have been rendered in a limited civil case), the court…