California Labor Defense Lawyer & Attorney : Van Vleck Turner & Zaller Law Firm : Employment Litigators : Serving Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose

CNN Money.com reports that many companies across the U.S. are encountering wage and hour issues that California companies are all too familiar with.  The article reports:

Rod Cotner, owner of Jericho Mortgage in Lancaster, Ohio, was shocked when the U.S. Department of Labor showed up at his door to investigate a wage-and-hour lawsuit filed on behalf of his 54 loan officers and sales managers.

His company was growing - sales exceeded $4 million that year - and his employees were profiting: "Some of the staffers named in the lawsuit were making over $150,000," he says. "After working in the industry for years, I'd never heard of this happening. Everyone pays their officers on a commission basis. How can someone who makes six figures a year demand back wages for his time?"

In 2006 the U.S. Department of Labor collected $172 million in back wages from employers, which is reported to be 3.6 percent higher than 2005.

Also, the article illustrates that while these laws were intended to protect employees, the laws often times have the opposite effect.  This is especially true in California where the meal and rest break laws are so rigid that the employees cannot enter into agreements with their employer to skip meal breaks when needed for family issues.  The article quotes Don Turner, the owner of the Golden Bear Inn in Berkeley:

"I had an employee who wanted to watch his child's Little League game at four, but he was scheduled to get off at 4:30," he says. "He asked me if he could work through his lunch break instead, and I had to refuse him - the overtime law just wouldn't let me."

The article concludes with a very appropriate caution to employers:

For now, the best that a small-business owner can do to avoid overtime lawsuits is keep painstaking payroll records for nonexempt employees and consult an employment lawyer to verify workers' status. And make sure to keep a sharp eye out for the kind of dedicated worker who might be tempted to skip lunch.

As a final warning, California employers need the advice of an attorney well versed in California labor and employment law - California law is more restrictive than federal law in almost every aspect.  Courts apply the law that provides employees with the most protection, which means that California law applies in almost every case.

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On January 15, 2008, the Court of Appeal in Puerto v. Superior Court (Wild Oats) [PDF] [Word], concluded that an opt-in notice established by the trial court as a process to obtain witnesses' residential contact information "unduly hampered" plaintiffs' in conducting discovery.

In October 2006, Plaintiffs filed suit against Wild Oats alleging they were misclassified as exempt employees, and are seeking recovery for overtime compensation, compensate for all hours worked, and unfair business practices.

Plaintiffs served written discovery on Wild Oats that included Form Interrogatory No. 12.1, which requested that Wild Oats: “State the name, ADDRESS, and telephone number of each individual: [¶] (a) who witnessed the INCIDENT or the events occurring immediately before or after the INCIDENT; [¶] (b) who made any statement at the scene of the INCIDENT; [¶] (c) who heard any statements made about the INCIDENT by any individual at the scene; and [¶] (d) who YOU OR ANYONE ACTING ON YOUR BEHALF claim has knowledge of the INCIDENT (except for expert witnesses covered by Code of Civil Procedure section 2034).”

Wild Oats disclosed between 2600 and 3000 names and positions in the responses to Interrogatory No. 12.1.  However, Wild Oats withheld the individuals’ residential telephone numbers and addresses, citing privacy rights on behalf of the individuals listed.

After plaintiffs brought a motion to compel disclosure of the individuals’ contact information, the trial court approved a process by which a third party administrator would send a letter to each of the individuals informing them of plaintiffs’ request for their contact information. The letter contained an opt-in provision that stated, “The court has ordered the parties to send this letter to you so that you may decide whether or not you wish to disclose this information to the Plaintiffs’ attorneys. If you consent to the disclosure of your contact information, please complete and return the enclosed postcard to the Third-Party-Administrator . . . .”

The Court of Appeal found that the trial court’s use of the opt-in procedure was an abuse of discretion that exceeded the protections necessary to safeguard the legitimate privacy interests in the addresses and telephone numbers of the witnesses. The Court of Appeal stated:

While the trial court here implicitly found that a serious invasion of privacy would result unless an opt-in notice was used, we believe that conclusion is unsupported by facts or law. Here, just as in Pioneer, the requested information, while personal, is not particularly sensitive, as it is merely contact information, not medical or financial details, political affiliations, sexual relationships, or personnel information. [citations] This is basic civil discovery. These individuals have been identified by Wild Oats as witnesses. Nothing could be more ordinary in discovery than finding out the location of identified witnesses so that they may be contacted and additional investigation performed. [citation] As the Supreme Court pointed out in Pioneer, the information sought by the petitioners here—the location of witnesses—is generally discoverable, and it is neither unduly personal nor overly intrusive. [citation] In some respects, the potential intrusion here is even less significant than that in Pioneer, because here the requested disclosure does not involve individuals’ identities, which had already been disclosed by Wild Oats prior to the filing of the motion to compel. There simply is no evidence that disclosure of the contact information for these already-identified witnesses is a transgression of the witnesses’ privacy that is “sufficiently serious in [its] nature, scope, and actual or potential impact to constitute an egregious breach of the social norms underlying the privacy right.” [citation]

It is important to note that the court also recognized that the employer has a duty to protect employee’s contact information and “[s]hould any individual identified as a witness later feel that there has been an unnecessary invasion of his or her privacy, this will become an issue between the employee and [the employer], not the employee and [plaintiffs].”

The Court of Appeal did, however, still leaves open alternative discovery avenues to limit public disclosure of employee contact information:

This is not to say that the trial court was without the ability to enter a protective order limiting the dissemination of the witnesses’ contact information: Certainly the trial court may require that the information be kept confidential by the petitioners and not be disclosed except to their agents as needed in the course of investigating and pursuing the litigation. Moreover, should the trial court find that the record evidences discovery abuse warranting a protective order as to the manner and means of contacting witnesses, the trial court always retains the discretion to impose such an order.

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As a simple reminder, employers should begin to plan to adjust their payroll systems in order to ensure that all California employees are paid the new minimum wage of $8 per hour starting January 1, 2008.  With this increase, California will tie Massachusetts for the highest minimum wage rate in the country. 

Impact Upon Exempt Employees
Employers will also have to re-examine the pay rates for their exempt employees. One of the items California law requires for an employee to qualify as exempt (which means they are not entitled to overtime) the employee must earn at least two times minimum wage, base on a forty hour workweek. Therefore, the increase in the minimum wage means that the minimum salary for exempt employees will increase from to $31,200 in 2007 to $33,280 as of January 1, 2008.

In addition, employers should also review their pay rates for commissioned inside sales employees. For an employee to qualify as a commissioned inside sales employees who are exempt from overtime under Wage Order Nos. 4 and 7, the employee must earn at least 1.5 times the minimum wage for all hours of work to maintain the exemption. The employee must meet other requirements to qualify for this exemption, but the salary level is a bright-line rule that must be met in order for the exemption to apply.

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The California Supreme Court granted review of Harris v. Superior Court.  As previously posted about here, the only legal issue reviewed by the lower appellate court was the proper construction and application of the single phrase limiting exempt administrative duties to those that are “directly related to management policies or general business operations.”  The lower court dealt a serious blow to the viability of the administrative exemption for all employers in California and the Supreme Court may have granted review in order to give at least some life back to the administrative exemption.

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Daniel Schwartz over at the Connecticut Employment Law Blog, notes that Business Week's cover story on "Wage Wars" is not exactly breaking news (or at least should not be) for HR professionals and companies. 

He offers a few suggestions for readers in response to the article:

• Audit your exempt employees.  Go over job descriptions and compare that with actual duties.  Sometimes "managers" are just glorified sales workers.
• Take seriously any complaints by employees about their overtime.  If there is a problem, odds are the complaining employee isn't the only one with the problem.  And that means the potential for a class action case. 
  

California has been "leading" the wage and hour class action trend mentioned  in the Business Week article.  These cases have arguably been the leading types of lawsuits filed in California for over the last five years.  This is primarily due to California's unique wage and hour laws.  Employers not familiar with California law mistakenly believe that because their policies comply with the FLSA, they are in compliance with California law.  This is a costly mistake, as California's labor code is very unique, and out-of-state employers should always seek a California employment attorney's advice regarding whether the complies with California law.  For example, the following are issues that illustrate how unique California law is compared to the rest of the country:

Meal and Rest Period Penalties

This is the current favorite claim of plaintiff’s class action attorneys in California. A 2001 statute imposes substantial penalties on employers who do not comply with very technical regulations concerning the timing and duration of employee lunch and rest breaks. In general, employees must receive a 30-minute meal break (during which they must be relieved of all duty and be free to leave the premises) before they complete 5 hours of work if their shift will be longer than 6 hours for the day. Employees are entitled to a second meal break whenever their shift will be longer than twelve hours. And employees are also entitled to take paid rest periods of at least 10-minutes for every four hours of work, taken as close to the middle of each work period as possible. The aggregate liability that can result over time was apply demonstrated by a 2005 jury verdict in a meal and rest break class action against Wal-Mart that awarded over $192 million in penalties and punitive damages.

California Overtime Exemptions Are Based on “Counting Hours” Test

Like the FLSA, California law provides that various job categories are exempt from overtime, including outside salespeople, commissioned salespeople and “white collar” employees.  Employers have often defined positions on a nation-wide basis as salaried or hourly based on the definitions of exempt duties provided by the FLSA and its implementing regulations.  California law, however, frequently rejects these federal rules in favor of its own, narrower definition of exempt duties.  For example, under federal law, a position may be exempt from overtime where its “primary,” or most important job functions are exempt. In California, by contrast, the duties test is strictly quantitative — i.e., “does the employee spend more than 50% of his or her time performing exempt duties?”  If not, the position may be misclassified and substantial back overtime may be due.

Daily Overtime and Double-Time

Virtually all employers know that the FLSA requires payment of “time-and-one-half” premium pay for all hours worked beyond 40 hours in one workweek. But a surprisingly large number of employers who set up shop in California are ignorant of the fact that California also requires “time-and-a-half” overtime for all hours worked beyond eight in a single workday and for the first eight hours worked on the seventh consecutive day worked in a workweek. Unlike, the FLSA, California also requires overtime at a double-time rate for all hours worked beyond 12 hours in a single workday and for hours worked beyond eight on the seventh consecutive day worked in a single week.

Mandatory Sexual Harassment Training for Supervisors

California law requires employers with 50 or more employees to provide two hours of sexual harassment training to all supervisors once every two years. Regulations are currently being proposed to clarify the extent to which this obligation applies to supervisors who are located outside California, but supervise California employees and other issues raised by the requirement.

No “Use-It-Or-Lose-It” Vacation Policy

California treats earned, but unused vacation time, as a form of vested compensation, which cannot be forfeited and must be paid out in full at the termination of employment. So-called “use-it-or-lose-it” vacation plans, which are permissible in most other states, are therefore illegal in California.

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The recent Harris v. Superior Court opinion dealt with that most-litigated species of employee – the California claims adjuster. And the only legal issue on appeal was the proper construction and application of the single phrase limiting exempt administrative duties to those that are “directly related to management policies or general business operations.” Nevertheless, the case deals a serious blow to the viability of the administrative exemption for all employers in California. 

The Court began its analysis by surveying the exemption language of the California Wage Orders, federal regulations under the Fair Labor Standards Act and the substantial body of state and federal case law. I won’t retrace the tortuous semantic analysis that follows. Suffice it to say, however, that the majority concluded that the so-called “administrative/production” dichotomy is the correct test to apply. 

Many of the federal courts that originally developed and applied the “dichotomy” terminology considered it to be as a mere guidepost or analytical tool. But Harris elevates the distinction to the status of a legal litmus test for determining who may be exempt. At the same time it elevated the status of the “dichotomy” test, it also made the test far more restrictive. Indeed, according to the majority’s vision of the workplace, the vast majority of white collar employees will always qualify only as mere “production” workers because they inevitably spend their time on “day-to-day” business rather than determining how the business should operate “at the level of management policy or general operations.” 

As applied to the adjusters at issue in the case, the Court held that they could not be exempt because the work they did, although clearly sophisticated and important, was deemed to be a frequent part of the employer’s core business.

The undisputed facts show that plaintiffs are primarily engaged in work that falls on the production side of the dichotomy, namely, the day-to-day tasks involved in adjusting individual claims. They investigate and estimate claims, make coverage determinations, set reserves, negotiate settlements, make settlement recommendations for claims beyond their settlement authority, identify potential fraud, and so forth. None of that work is carried on at the level of management policy or general operations. Rather, it is all part of the day-to-day operation of defendants' business.

Moreover, the Court also took pains to emphasize that the test should not depend on the nature of the employer’s business but rather on the level at which the employee operates.

[T]he phrase “ administrative/production worker dichotomy” is misleading. Properly understood, the dichotomy is not between workers engaged in “ production” (e.g., factory workers) and workers engaged in “ administration”  (e.g., office workers). Rather, it is between office or nonmanual work that is at the level of policy or general operations and office or nonmanual work that is not. Thus, any office or nonmanual work that is not at the level of policy or general operations constitutes production work for purposes of the dichotomy, regardless of how loosely or intimately the work is connected with producing the employer's product.

The Harris decision thus represents a severe restriction on the use of the administrative exemption in California. Moreover, employers must remember that the “administrative/production worker dichotomy” discussed in Harris is merely one of the elements that must be satisfied. For example, it is also the employer’s burden to establish that the employee “customarily and regularly exercises discretion and independent judgment” and performs under only “general supervision.” 

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FedEx is still litigating its classification of its drivers as independent contractors. FedEx lost a case recently in California in Los Angeles and the court ruled the company owes 200 drivers $5.3 million in expenses.  In addition, the California Employment Development Department (EDD), which is responsible for collecting payroll taxes, assessed FedEx Ground owed more than $7.88 million in back payroll taxes because it also held the drivers were misclassified as independent contractors. The audit covered the period July 2001 to June 2004 and concluded that some of the drivers were properly classified as independent contractors, but found the “single-route” drivers were employees. 

As these cases illustrate, California employers need to approach the independent contractor classification very carefully.  If a worker is properly classified as an independent contractor it can save the company money and give the workers great flexibility.  However, misclassifying employees as independent contractors exposes the company large damages for unreimbursed expenses, unpaid overtime, back payroll taxes, and many other items.

For guidance on whether employers have properly classified its workers as independent contractors, the California Division of Labor Standards Enforcement (“DLSE”) provides an explanation of the “economic realities” test. The DLSE maintains that the most indicative fact determinative of whether a worker is an employee or an independent contractor depends on whether the person to whom service is rendered (the employer or principal) has control or the right to control the worker both as to the work done and the manner and means in which it is performed. The DLSE also sets forth the other factors that are considered when determining an employee’s status:

1. Whether the person performing services is engaged in an occupation or business distinct from that of the principal;
2. Whether or not the work is a part of the regular business of the principal or alleged employer;
3. Whether the principal or the worker supplies the instrumentalities, tools, and the place for the person doing the work;
4. The alleged employee’s investment in the equipment or materials required by his or her task or his or her employment of helpers;
5. Whether the service rendered requires a special skill;
6. The kind of occupation, with reference to whether, in the locality, the work is usually done under the direction of the principal or by a specialist without supervision;
7. The alleged employee’s opportunity for profit or loss depending on his or her managerial skill;
8. The length of time for which the services are to be performed;
9. The degree of permanence of the working relationship;
10. The method of payment, whether by time or by the job; and
11. Whether or not the parties believe they are creating an employer-employee relationship may have some bearing on the question, but is not determinative since this is a question of law based on objective tests.

Further details about the DLSE’s position on who classifies as an independent contractor can be found here. The DLSE’s information provides a great starting point for employers to audit their classifications of employees, but each case may present different facts, and the economic realities test may change depending on the jurisdiction (i.e., civil court or an EDD assessment) and whether state or federal law is at issue.

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The U. S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division website provides a self assessment tool for restaurants that employ minors. The assessment covers common violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA ). Restaurant owners should note that this assessment does not cover California state law items. The assessment covers items that the DOL found in the past to be some of the most common problems encountered in restaurants, and therefore, are likely issues a DOL investigator will look for in a restaurant.

Here is a list of a few of the items covered in the assessment:

Do any workers under 18 years of age do the following:
1. Operate or clean power-driven meat slicers or other meat processing machines?

2. Operate or clean any power-driven dough mixer or other bakery machines?

3. Operate, load, or unload scrap papers baler or paper box compactors?

4. Drive a motor-vehicle on the job?

Do any workers under 16 years of age do the following:
5. Cook?

6. Bake?

7. Clean cooking equipment or handle hot oil or grease?

8. Load or unload goods from a truck or conveyor?

9. Work inside a freezer or meat cooler?

10. Operate power-driven bread slicers or bagel slicers?

11. Operate any power-driven equipment?

12. Work from ladders?

13. Work during school hours?

14. Work before 7:00 a.m. on any day?

15. Work past 7:00 p.m. between Labor Day and June 1?

16. Work past 9:00 p.m. between June 1 and Labor Day?

17. Work more than 3 hours on a school day, including Fridays?

18. Work more than 8 hours on any day?

19. Work more than 18 hours in any week when school was in session?

20. Work more than 40 hours in any week when school was not in session?

21. Do you employ any workers who are less than 14 years of age?

22. Do you fail to maintain in your records a date of birth for every employee under 19 years of age?

Click here to take the entire assessment. At the end of the assessment, there is a rules summary that explains an employer’s responsibility under the FLSA for the issues on the assessment.

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