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.

The Department of Consumer Affairs refused to discuss settlement, refused to stipulate to an amendment, demurred, moved for summary adjudication, rejected a $600,000 section 998 offer and lost a six-week trial – and then appealed the $4,889,786.03 fee award that followed. Division Eight affirmed all of it: top-of-market Los Angeles rates supported by the trial judge's own observation of counsel, a 1.75 multiplier through verdict and 1.25 on the fee litigation, and two holdings with reach – that a fee payable from public funds does not bar an enhancement, and that Ketchum's rule does not apply to FEHA fees, which section 12965 makes discretionary and therefore contingent until the final fee order.

A jury found that the Department of State Hospitals discriminated against Ashley Howell because of a mental disability, and awarded her lost earnings, lost health insurance, and nothing for pain and suffering. By the end of the appeal the insurance award was gone, the zero pain-and-suffering verdict stood, and a $1.75 million attorney fee request had been reduced to $135,102. The insurance award fell because Howell proved an obligation rather than a loss: she introduced a premium invoice she never paid, and she bought no replacement coverage, so there was nothing to compensate. The fee award survived because the trial court could not audit block-billed hours and because the request had grown more than tenfold from counsel's own pretrial estimate. Howell's only appellate win was a remand to rule on the prejudgment interest nobody had opposed. This is an adverse decision, and its value to the plaintiff's bar is as a checklist of what the damages and fee record has to contain.

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.

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,…

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.

Attorney fees awarded under section 12965 belong to the attorneys whose services earned them, except to the extent the attorneys and client have entered an enforceable agreement providing otherwise; the portion of a statutory fee award exceeding fees the client already paid does not belong to the client by default.