The Supreme Court of California’s decision favoring health care workers in a lawsuit alleging that a health care services and staffing company committed meal-period violations should cause every California employer to take note, according to a legal expert.
Paul Grossman, general counsel of the nonprofit California Employment Law Council, told the Southern California Record that the Supreme Court’s Feb. 25 decision in the class action lawsuit Donohue v. AMN Services, LLC, doesn’t impose any new burden on employers but gives them valuable advice in an “additional technique for establishing the legality of a particular meal.”
The Supreme Court said in the case that employers cannot round time punches that track meal periods, reversing lower courts’ decisions and sending the case back to the trial court, the opinion said. The court also said “that time records showing noncompliant meal periods raise a rebuttable presumption of meal period violations, including at the summary judgment stage.”
The class action lawsuit that Kennedy Donohue, a nurse recruiter in AMN’s San Diego offices, filed on April 2014 against the company included claims that the company “improperly rounded time records for meal periods using Team Time,” an electronic timekeeping system, the Supreme Court’s opinion said. The timekeeping system “rounded the time punches to the nearest 10-minute increment,” the opinion said.
California employers are required to provide “employees with one 30-minute meal period that begins no later than the end of the fifth hour of work,” the opinion said.
A trial court decided in favor of AMN, saying, “its practice of rounding the time punches for meal periods was proper,” the opinion said. That judgment was upheld on appeal, the opinion said.
“We reverse the judgment of the Court of Appeal with directions to remand to the trial court for further proceedings consistent with this opinion,” the opinion said.
The Supreme Court’s decision doesn’t put any additional burden on employers, Grossman said.
“Indeed, my organization, the California Employment Law Council, conceded that you can’t round in terms of determining the timeliness of meals,” Grossman, who is a partner with the Los Angeles law firm Paul Hastings LLP, said. “Let’s assume that someone clocks out for their meal at 12:02 and clocks in for their meal at 12:28. If you round, that becomes 12 to 12:30 and a compliant meal, but they only got a 26-minute meal. I mean, you can’t do that, and none of our members do that.”
The Team Time electronic timekeeping system AMN used included a drop-down menu that offered employees choices to record why a meal period was “missed, short or delayed,” the opinion said. The Supreme Court’s decision validated that practice, Grossman said.
“This is tremendously important. Every employer in California that can do so, from a technical standpoint, should now be considering the use of drop-down menus,” Grossman said. “If there is apparent late-punch for meals and the employee clocks out for a meal late, the drop-menu asks, ‘Was this your free, personal choice or did you not have the opportunity to start your meal on time?’"
Every employer in California should look at the Supreme Court’s decision and decide whether they want to consider the use of drop-down menus for apparently noncompliant meal punches, Grossman said.