California Meal and Rest Breaks Will Be Served Up by The California Supreme Court Soon
The law requires that workers must be given time to rest and eat during the work day.
The question now before the highest court in California is, who is responsible to make sure the law is followed?
Abuse abounds in this area of law. Employers acknowledge that employees are entitled to normal breaks and meals during the day. At the same time, some employers create an environment that systematically discourages breaks.
The result is that employees are forced to work through these breaks and many times must eat on the run.
In some lower court cases the employer has been able to persuade the judge that a policy allowing breaks is all that is required. Lawyers that represent workers have demonstrated that this leads to mass violations of the law. It is no secret that if an employee demands his right to rest and eat he is likely to find himself in hot water.
This fight has been taken head on by class action attorneys who are able to represent the entire employee base without putting individual workers at risk. This approach is an effective deterrent to employers who systematically violate the law. Employers are trying to prevent enforcement by taking the position that any violations, even if wide spread, should be handled on an individual and not a class wide basis. To sustain this position employers argue that it is the individual employee who has the power to decide to work thru his breaks. Therefore the employer states that it should not be held responsible on a class wide basis, even if it is found to be a systematic problem. Under this view of the law, even if there are intentional violations then each employee must individually enforce his rights through the courts and this is obviously highly impractical.
In order for the law to be meaningful, the Supreme Court is being asked to find that the burden is on the employer to prove that these breaks and meal periods are not only policy but are also being enforced. The fact is that this does not create any meaningful burden on the employer as he has the ability to control and monitor.
The main cases now under review by the California Supreme Court are two Court of Appeal court decisions in Brinker Restaurant Corp. v. Superior Court (Hohnbaum), 2008 WL 2806613 (Cal. Ct. App., July 22, 2008), and Brinkley v. Public Storage, 2008 WL 4716800 (Cal. Ct. App., October 28, 2008).
Your employer must make meal breaks available to you if you are a non exempt employee (an employee who is eligible to receive overtime pay). Failure to provide a meal break obligates an employer to pay non exempt employees one hour of pay.
The Law:
An employer must pay a nonexempt employee an hour’s pay for failure to provide a meal or rest period.
An employer who falsifies employment records is in serious trouble under a recently enacted California statute. As of January 1, 2009, it is a crime for an employer to require an employee to sign-off on any record of hours worked that the employer knows to be false.
This provides added protection where managers force employees to sign statements regarding their hours worked knowing at the time it is untrue, or where they alter time cards.
Strategy:
The fact is that over time the right to back compensation, interest and penalties add up to big dollars especially if it has occurred over an extended period of time. You are permitted to recover for missed meal and breaks for a period extending back over 4 years from the time you file your claim in court.
It is easy to get sound advice and an estimate of how much you may be owed by contacting a qualified California labor law attorney. Many of these matters are taken on contingency so you do not have to pay for representation unless you recover on your claim.
Photo Credit: Shutterstock/Piotr Adamowicz