Wage and Hour

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Whether California’s recently adopted “ABC” test, used in the employee-versus-independent contractor analysis in cases involving California’s wage orders, must be applied retroactively should be decided by the California Supreme Court, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has decided, withdrawing its controversial May 2, 2019, opinion. Vazquez v. Jan-Pro Franchising…

Last year, the California Supreme Court held the federal “de minimis” doctrine does not apply to California state law claims for unpaid wages for off-the-clock work allegedly performed on a regularly occurring basis in store closing and related activities. Troester v. Starbucks Corp., 5 Cal. 5th 829. However, the California Supreme Court also noted that…

In April 2018, the California Supreme Court issued its ruling in Dynamex Operations West v. Superior Court (2018) 4 Cal. 5th 903, 916-17 and set forth the standards for determining independent contractor status for purposes of the California Industrial Welfare Commission Wage Orders. The Court presumed that a worker is an employee unless he or…

After a one-day bench trial, a sales representative for a security company successfully established that his employer had failed to reimburse him for mileage expenses, using only his odometer reading as the basis to calculate the owed mileage. Plaintiff was a “High Volume Sales Representative,” meaning that he worked almost exclusively in the field making…

While best practices would be to use the employer’s registered name, a recent Court of Appeal opinion has upheld an employer’s use of its fictitious business name in its wage statements.

California Labor Code section 226 lists information that must be included in every employee’s wage statement. Pursuant to subsection (a)(8), one piece of information …

The Labor Commissioner fined a Southern-California car wash for more than $2.36 million for alleged wage and hour violations. These fines included both civil penalties and wages owed to employees. This appears to be a continuation of the agency’s enforcement actions against commercial car washes from 2012 and 2015.

In addition to fining the company,…

On March 26, 2019, proposed Assembly Bill 5, which would codify the California Supreme Court’s controversial Dynamex decision, was amended to exempt certain types of licensed workers. Just as noteworthy as the types of workers identified as exempt from the standard are the types of employees who were not identified. For example, the exemption does…

If you have ever received a pre-litigation records request, then you may already know that such a request tends to be a harbinger of a lawsuit on the horizon. Plaintiff’s lawyers regularly use Labor Code provisions to obtain pay and personnel records, before a lawsuit has been filed. While employees (or their representative) are undoubtedly…