CALIFORNIA SUPREME COURT: EMPLOYEES GENERALLY ENTITLED TO PAY FOR EVEN SMALL AMOUNTS OF OFF-THE-CLOCK WORK

The California Supreme Court recently addressed whether employers are on the hook for small amounts of unpaid work that employees perform at the end of their shifts.  The Court concluded that the plaintiff, a Starbucks shift supervisor, was entitled to be paid for tasks that required him to work between 4 and 10 minutes each day after clocking out.  See Troester v. Starbucks Corp., S234969 (Cal. July 26, 2018), available here. 

The legal question for the Court was whether there is a so-called "de minimis" exception (i.e., an exception for very small amounts of time) to California's rule that employees must be paid for all time worked.  The federal law governing overtime pay – the Fair Labor Employment Standards Act – includes such a de minimis exception.

The Court held that California’s laws are stricter, requiring payment for the type of post-clock-out work that the Starbucks employee performed, even though the unpaid time was as brief as four minutes per day.  The Court left open the question of whether unpaid work activities in other cases might be “so irregular or brief in duration” that it would be reasonable to require employers to compensate for them.
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The Court offered several reasons for its decision:  First, it noted that statutory wage-and-hour protections for employees in California are “scrupulously guarded against encroachment."  Compare Augustus v. ABM Security Servs., Inc. (2016) 2 Cal.5th 257, 262 (strictly enforcing right to ten-minute rest periods).  Second, the Court pointed out that when unpaid work is being performed but the working time is difficult to track, there is little reason why “the employee alone should bear the burden of that difficulty.”  Third, the Court pointed out that class action procedures are premised upon the ability to challenge violations that are small as to a particular individual but are significant in the aggregate.  And fourth, the Court noted that new technologies make it easier to track employee work time today than was the case in 1946, when a key federal case on the de minimis issue was decided.

The case provides helpful guidance concerning when employers in California may be held liable to employees who have routinely performed small amounts of unpaid work.