California employment case index

An EMT sought to certify a 135-worker class alleging the employer left nondiscretionary “EMS Bonuses” out of the regular rate, underpaying overtime and premiums. The Fifth District reverses the denial of class certification: the employer’s gift/discretion defense applied to every EMS Bonus, so it was not a defense “unique” to the named plaintiff.

Lauren Brown filed the fifth of five overlapping PAGA actions against the same restaurant operator. While her case sat stayed, the employer settled globally with an earlier plaintiff, and the trial court then granted judgment on the pleadings. Division Eight affirmed. The only contested question it reached was whether the settling plaintiff's failure to wait the full 65 days after her amended agency notice destroyed the settlement's preclusive effect – and the court held it did not, because nothing extends the waiting period to amended notices and the agency itself had accepted the settlement. Brown also lacked standing for violations postdating her 2018 separation.

The California Supreme Court unanimously upholds Proposition 22 (Bus. & Prof. Code, § 7451), holding that the Legislature’s “plenary” and “unlimited” authority over workers’ compensation under article XIV, section 4 is not exclusive of the people’s reserved initiative power — while expressly reserving the harder questions about Proposition 22’s seven-eighths amendment rule.

Home Depot’s Kronos system recorded Delmer Camp’s time to the minute — then quarter-hour rounding paid him for 470 fewer minutes than his own timecards showed. The Sixth District reversed summary judgment: under Troester and Donohue, an employer that can capture and has captured exact worktime must pay for all of it, and no California text authorizes rounding that underpays an identifiable employee. The panel invited the Supreme Court to decide whether See’s Candy neutral rounding survives at all — and the Court granted review (S277518), where the case remains pending. Cite it as persuasive only, with the review-granted parenthetical, and re-verify status before filing.

Two Nordstrom employees worked stretches of more than six consecutive days, but never seven days inside a single established workweek, and always with at least one short shift. The Ninth Circuit certified three questions, and a unanimous Supreme Court answered all of them on one page: the day-of-rest guarantee runs by the workweek rather than on a rolling seven days, so runs spanning two workweeks are not per se prohibited; the six-hour exemption applies only where the employee never exceeds six hours on any day of that week, because the contrary reading would let a single short shift swallow the rule; and an employer 'causes' a lost day of rest by inducing the employee to forgo it, owing a duty to apprise employees of the right and then maintain absolute neutrality about its exercise.

There is no California statute or case law authorizing or prohibiting employee time rounding, so Division One borrowed the federal rule: an employer may round punch times to the nearest tenth of an hour if the policy is fair and neutral on its face and, as applied, does not fail over time to compensate employees for the time they actually worked. The posture is narrow – a writ vacating summary adjudication on two of the employer's affirmative defenses, with the court expressly leaving open whether either side will prevail. The plaintiff's expert lost the case by treating the employer's separate grace-period policy as if it were rounding. Whether neutral rounding survives at all is now pending before the California Supreme Court in Camp v. Home Depot, S277518.

Three Oracle instructors living in Colorado and Arizona worked a limited number of days in California for their California-headquartered employer. Answering certified questions from the Ninth Circuit, the California Supreme Court held that the Labor Code's overtime provisions apply to work performed in this state regardless of residence, and that those violations support a UCL claim – but that the UCL does not reach FLSA violations occurring in other states on these stipulated facts. The court confined its holding to overtime and to entire days and weeks worked in California.

A worker fired nine months into his vacation year was denied every day of accrued vacation pay because his employer's policy made eligibility turn on still being employed on his anniversary date – a rule it had applied to roughly 300 departing employees. A unanimous Supreme Court held the policy could not defeat the right. Vacation pay is not a gratuity but deferred wages earned by the year's labor, so a proportionate right to it vests as the work is performed, exactly as pension rights vest on acceptance of employment. An anniversary requirement is at most a condition subsequent, and Labor Code section 227.3 forbids an employer policy from turning that condition into a forfeiture of what has already been earned.