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.

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.

The after-acquired-evidence defence is raised in a large share of wrongful-termination cases and its effect is routinely mis-stated. It does not defeat liability. Under McKennon it limits the remedy — no reinstatement and no front pay as a general rule, with backpay running from the unlawful discharge to the date the employer actually discovered the wrongdoing — and under Salas v. Sierra Chemical Co. the same is true in California of both after-acquired evidence and unclean hands, neither of which is a complete defence to a FEHA claim. This analysis fixes the cut-off date, sets out what the employer must prove to earn it, keeps Salas's immigration-status holding in its proper place as a separate federal overlay, and explains why Camp v. Jeffer, Mangels, Butler & Marmaro — the one California decision to produce a complete bar — now sits uneasily with Salas.

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.

The FEHA does not require an employer to accommodate an employee’s use of medical marijuana. The Compassionate Use Act did not address the rights and duties of employers and employees, and under California law an employer may require pre-employment drug testing and may take illegal drug use into account in employment…