Employers cannot round workers meal break times, state Supreme Court rules

Employers cannot round their employees' time punches for meal breaks up or down, and records showing employees did not take the breaks they're entitled to raises a rebuttable presumption that the employer engaged in meal period violations, the state Supreme Court said Thursday.

Written by Justice Goodwin H. Liu, the opinion reversed decisions by the Court of Appeal, which was ordered to remand the case to the trial court.

The lawsuit was filed in 2014 by a nurse recruiter at AMN Services LLC, a health care services and staffing company, and received class certification the next year. The plaintiff said the company denied its employees meal periods in accordance with an Industrial Welfare Commission wage order, which requires certain employers to provide at least a 30-minute meal break before an employee has worked the first five hours of a shift.

According to the plaintiff, AMN "had an office culture that discouraged employees from taking full and timely lunches." She also said the company required employees to punch in and out for their lunch breaks, and used a digital timekeeping system that rounded the time punches to the nearest 10-minute increment. Before September 2012, AMN would give an employee premium pay if the timekeeping system showed they missed or took a shorter break, according to the high court's opinion. After September 2012, AMN would give an employee premium pay only if they said they were not provided an opportunity to take their break.

The plaintiff said the rounding system effectively denied employees their right to premium pay if they did not take a compliant meal break. According to the logic of an expert who testified in the lower court, the state Supreme Court said, "A 23-minute lunch starting at 11:02 a.m. and ending at 11:25 a.m. [would be] recorded on Team Time as a 30-minute lunch starting at 11 a.m. and ending at 11:30 a.m."

While the 4th District Court of Appeal said the plain text of the state Labor Code and wage order that governs meal periods does not prohibit rounding, the high court disagreed.

"The precision of the time requirements set out in Labor Code Section 512 and Wage Order No. 4 -- 'not less than 30 minutes' and 'five hours per day' or '10 hours per day' -- is at odds with the imprecise calculations that rounding involves," Liu wrote. "The premise of this approach is that even relatively minor infringements on meal periods can cause substantial burdens to the employee."

Further disagreeing with the Court of Appeal, the high court said, "Time records showing noncompliant meal periods raise a rebuttable presumption of meal period violations, including at the summary judgment stage."

Chief Justice Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye, and Justices Carol A. Corrigan, Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, Leondra R. Kruger, and Joshua P. Groban concurred, as did Justice Brian M. Hoffstadt of the 2nd District Court of Appeal.