California Court Trends Toward Worker Pay Beyond Scheduled Shift

The California Supreme Court this week reinforced its trend of asserting that workers should be paid for every minute of their labor, adding specificity to when a worker is considered to be under an employer’s control.

The March 25 ruling in Huerta v. CSI Electrical Contractors, which found that workers should be paid for time spent waiting for a visual inspection of their cars at the end of a shift, joins at least two other major decisions in which the state’s Supreme Court has employees are entitled to pay for mandatory processes that take place beyond a worker’s scheduled hours.

Among the factors the court identified as showing that plaintiff George Huerta was under CSI’s control during the exit process were the fact that the security check was mandatory, primarily benefited CSI, and that Huerta couldn’t leave CSI’s premises without undergoing it.

“An activity’s mandatory nature ‘remains probative in determining whether an employee is subject to the employer’s control,’” the court said.

‘Clearly Compensable’

The Huerta ruling follows a 2020 ruling that left Apple Inc. on the hook for millions after not paying employees for five to 20 minute bag searches after their shifts. The court also ruled in 2018 that Starbucks Corp. hourly workers should be paid for short periods of off-the-clock work, like closing up the store.

“The Court is pretty reliable in interpreting California law in worker-friendly ways that align with the values of our residents and the intentions of our legislators,” said Jahan Sagafi, a partner with Outten & Golden LLP who represents employees.

Like those two, the Huerta ruling is fact-specific and tailored to his particular work environment, said Bailey Bifoss, who represents employers as a partner with Seyfarth Shaw LLP. But taken with the other recent rulings, a fuller picture of the way the court views worker wages is beginning to emerge.

“They give us data points on the line between what is clearly non-compensable, on one end, and what is clearly compensable, all the way on the other side,” she said. “We get these data points, like the Huerta case, that show, ‘this particular fact scenario falls at this point in the spectrum.’ And that helps guide our decisions moving forward.”

Little confusion should remain over when a worker’s compensable time starts and ends, employee-side attorney Christian Schreiber said.

“As our ability to actually record that time has increased and become more precise, the bold excuses of rounding up to the closest 15 minutes, or whatever—those things are practices of the past,” said Schreiber, a partner with Olivier & Schreiber LLP.

Industries Affected

In addition to ruling that a visual car security check was compensable, the court ruled that a site’s entrance point, if it serves a purpose beyond pure entry, could count as a first location where a worker’s clock starts.

This second part of the ruling directly implicates industries like logging and mining, said Glenn Danas, an employee-side partner with Clarkson Law Firm.

California workers in these industries are required by state law to receive compensation for the time they spend during a shift traveling between sites, starting at the first location they report to for a work-related reason beyond simply commuting.

Also, some types of security checks likely won’t meet this court’s threshold to be compensable under any of the aspects of its ruling, Danas said.

The key in Huerta is that the security process took up to a minute or more each time, Danas said. A quicker security process, like a retinal scan that takes only seconds, might not require payment for employees, he said.

“It wasn’t just scanning a badge to get through a gate,” Danas said. “It was something substantially more intrusive than that.”

The ruling also expressed limits on what counts as being under an employer’s control, said Bifoss. Rules for orderly behavior in the workplace don’t count, she said.

For example, the court has said it won’t consider time walking from a door to a lobby elevator compensable just because a worker “is prohibited from riding a skateboard into the lobby,” Bifoss said.

Home Depot Case

A lower court still needs to rule on Huerta’s case. The California Supreme Court’s ruling answers key questions posed after the Ninth Circuit heard oral arguments in 2022 and had asked the state Supreme Court to answer key questions on what state wage laws require, like whether state law requires compensation for vehicle security checks such as Huerta’s.

The California Supreme Court will soon have another chance to expand on its time rulings when it considers whether Home Depot USA Inc. wrongly rounded its time clocks up to the quarter hour to determine employee pay.

For plaintiff Delmer Camp, this lost time over four-and-a-half years accumulated into seven hours. “That’s the difference between you being able to get a bus pass, or family dinner,” Danas said.

The high court agreed to take up Camp’s case last February but hasn’t yet heard arguments.