Articles Posted in Wage & Hour Law

For years, the battle over arbitration clauses and agreements has raged on in courts and legislatures throughout the country. The latest development in arbitration in employment in California came on Thursday in California when Governor Newsom signed AB 51. The governor’s approval of AB 51 is a victory employees throughout California- it effectively prohibits employers…

May 1 is International Workers’ Day, or May Day, and is a day to celebrate laborers and workers. It also commemorates workers who were killed while on strike protesting for an eight-hour work day in Chicago during what is known as the Haymarket affair. Just in time for May Day, yesterday the California Supreme Court…

Wage disparities between men and women continue to be a significant problem even today. In 2016, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that female full-time wage and salary workers only made 88% of what their male counterparts made. (https://www.bls.gov/regions/west/news-release/womensearnings_california.htm) So, for every $100 a man earns, his female counterpart only earns $88. Recently, two tech…

In 2012, the Supreme Court gave employers and employees alike clear rules about meal and rest breaks in California. The Court held that employers were required to provide employees with a full, thirty minute, uninterrupted meal period if an employee works five or more hours in a shift. In the alternative, employees may agree –…

The tension between an employee’s simple right to receive his wages for work he performed and the U.S. Supreme Court’s favoritism towards employers, is almost palpable in the tortured history of Sonic-Calabasas A, Inc. v. Moreno (Sonic II) ___ Ca.4th ___ (Oct. 17, 2013). Here the employer imposed an arbitration agreement upon Mr. Moreno. When…

On May 16, 2012, the California Supreme Court granted review of Duran v. U.S. National Bank (USB) (2012) 203 Cal. App 4th 212. In that case, a class of bank employees won an award of $15 million for unpaid overtime. The award was based on a variety of evidence which included a random sample of…

The California Supreme Court has laid clear, after much confusion, the proper standard by which employers must provide their employees with meal periods, imposing an affirmative burden to completely relieve their employees from duty so that the employees may take full, thirty-minute, uninterrupted meal periods. If the employer fails to meet its obligation to do…

I’m not so sure why so much attention has been paid to Sullivan v. Oracle, other than the case has been up and down and all around the court system. See, e.g., Sullivan v. Oracle, 51 Cal.4th 1191 (2011); Sullivan v. Oracle, 662 F.3d 1265 (9th Cir. 2011). The recent holdings (by the Ninth Circuit…

The conservative US Supreme Court’s activist agenda is in full throttle in the mandatory arbitration arena. In the AT&T v. Concepcion case (see prior blog of July 6, 2011), the US Supreme Court planted its thumb squarely on the employer’s side of the scales of justice by overturning past law and holding that there is…

Mr. Kasten was fired by Saint-Gobain because he complained that the company prevented its workers from being paid for the time they spent “donning and doffing” (putting on required protective gear). He claimed that the location of the company’s time clocks caused this problem. Kasten v. Saint-Gobain Performance Plastic Corp., __ U.S. __ (March 22,…