California employment case index

The unpaid-wages component of section 558 is not a civil penalty recoverable through PAGA; only the fixed civil penalties ($50/$100 per employee per pay period) are PAGA penalties. Because the unpaid wages are not part of the PAGA claim, the trial court could not compel that portion to arbitration as if it were.

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…

A PAGA plaintiff is presumptively entitled to discover the identities and contact information of other aggrieved employees statewide, subject to the employees’ privacy interests (which may be protected through a Belaire-West opt-out notice) rather than to a heightened threshold showing of merit before discovery.

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.

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).

Iskanian v. CLS Transportation (2014) 59 Cal.4th 348 holds that class-action waivers in employment arbitration agreements are enforceable after Concepcion (abrogating Gentry), but a predispute waiver of a representative PAGA action is contrary to public policy and not preempted by the FAA, because a PAGA claim belongs to the state.

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.