MOISES Negrete worked at Conagra Foods, Inc.’s food processing facilities located all over California. Moises and other workers sued their employer in a class action, alleging failure to provide them lawful meal and rest periods but automatically deducting time for meal periods, even when employees did not take a meal break. Employees also alleged employer failure to pay correct wages due to improper rounding of employees’ clock-in and clock-out times; and failure to pay for the off-the-clock time employees spent putting on and removing protective gear as required by the employer.
Under California law, employees must be paid for all hours worked. When time entries reflect that an employee is on the job a few minutes more than the shift time, questions arise as to computation of the work hours. Federal law allows “rounding” employee’s hours to calculate the number of hours worked. Following the de minimis doctrine, any insubstantial period of time beyond the scheduled working hours (for example 5 minutes of going through a bag check) may be disregarded. Such time may be rounded out to the nearest 5 minutes of the employee’s start or end time.
In contrast, California law mandates that employees should be paid “for all hours worked.” Hours worked means “the time during which an employee is subject to the control of an employer, and includes all the time the employee is suffered or permitted to work, whether or not required to do so.”
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