Virtually every employer in California has repeated the mantra of “no off-the-clock work” to its employees. But what about those minutes that are “on-the-clock” but remain unpaid because of rounding practices? Since 2012, when the California appellate court decided See’s Candy Shops, Inc. v. Superior Court, 210 Cal. App. 4th 889 (2012), employers have presumed that so long as their rounding policy was neutral on its face (meaning it rounds time both up and down), and neutral as applied such that over a period of time employees were fairly compensated for all time actually worked, then the system was lawful.
This conclusion was called into question in the recent case of Camp v. Home Depot USA, Inc., No. H049033, 2022 WL 13874360 (Cal. Ct. App., Oct. 24, 2022). Home Depot used a time-tracking system that captured each minute worked, but nonetheless applied a quarter-hour rounding system. Mr. Camp and his co-plaintiff, Adrianna Correa, filed a putative class action for unpaid wages, claiming that the rounding policy resulted in working time that was not paid. However, the statistics presented by the parties in the trial court showed that in the aggregate, employees in the class sample were paid for 5,656 hours more than if Home Depot did not round time. The trial court found the practice facially neutral and neutral as applied, and entered summary judgment for Home Depot based on the test articulated in the See’s case.
Plaintiffs appealed. Notwithstanding the aggregate...
A US judge has dismissed veteran singer Smokey Robinson's defamation claim against four former housekeepers who have accused him of sexual assault. The women sued the Motown star, 86, last year fo...