This past month, the California Supreme Court granted a petition to review the Court of Appeal’s decision in Camp v. Home Depot U.S.A., Inc.
As we wrote about previously, the Court of Appeal in Camp departed from a longstanding precedent, See’s Candy Shops, Inc. v. Superior Court, infra, in holding that if an employer’s timekeeping system could determine the exact amount of time that employees have worked, the employer must fully compensate those employees for all time worked, instead of using a neutral rounding policy. The Camp Court also specifically invited the Supreme Court to address this issue.
See’s Candy Shops, Inc. v. Superior Court, 210 Cal. App. 4th 889 (2012), had held that an employer could utilize a time rounding policy as long as it was “fair and neutral on its face” and was used in a way that did not result, over a period of time, “in failure to compensate the employees properly for all the time they have actually worked.” Multiple California courts have cited See’s Candy favorably since.
In Camp, the plaintiff alleged that Home Depot’s policy of rounding clock-in and clock-out times to the nearest quarter hour resulted in unpaid minimum and overtime wages. The trial court granted summary judgment to Home Depot on the ground that its rounding policy was neutral on its face, neutral as applied and otherwise lawful under See’s Candy. On appeal, the Court or Appeal disagreed and reversed the trial court’s decision, relying heavily on the...
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