204 | 2024 Cal-Peculiarities ©2024 Seyfarth Shaw LLP www.seyfarth.com waiting at a security checkpoint and traveling to and from the employer parking lot.64 The construction workers in Huerta were building a solar power facility on privately-owned land, with allegedly lengthy delays in entering and exiting the site resulting from the particular ingress and egress restrictions. A private road provided access between a guard shack, located at the perimeter of the land and the employee parking lots, located several miles away at the construction site. At the beginning of the workday, Huerta was required to report to a security gate located about ten to fifteen minutes from the employee parking lot. Cars formed a long line outside the security gate, while security guards scanned each worker’s badge, and occasionally looked inside cars and truck beds. This same procedure occurred at the end of the work day, and it could take up to a minute or more per vehicle, thereby causing exit delays of between five and thirty minutes. Compounding the delay at the security checkpoint was the fact that two endangered species lived on the land, which caused the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to limit the speed workers could travel to 20 miles per hour, prohibited them from playing music (which might disturb the animals), and required that a biologist ensure the road was clear of these species each morning. The California Supreme Court found that time spent on employer premises waiting in a personal vehicle to scan an identification badge and have a security guard peer into a personal vehicle was compensable as “hours worked.” It concluded that Huerta was subject to employer control while waiting in the line to exit through the security gate—even while in his personal vehicle. The Court reached this conclusion because the search was for CSI’s benefit (i.e., preventing theft of tools and endangered species on the site), and the employee was required to do more than merely present a badge in order to exit (i.e., undergo the examination of the vehicle). The Court did not create a rule of general application, but rather relied on the presence and activities of the security guards to distinguish this case from more typical situations like stopping at a gate at a parking garage to exit, swiping a card or using a key to unlock a door to exit the employer's building, or flashing an identification card to bypass a security line. 7.3.3 Reporting time pay and split shift pay Reporting time. Nonexempt employees sometimes report for work, only to find that the expected work is not available. When that happens, California employers must pay for at least one-half the scheduled work (with the pay to be no less than two hours nor more than four hours).65 Nonexempt employees also sometimes report for work a second time within the same workday to find less than two hours of work to perform on the second reporting. When that happens, the employer must pay two hours “at the employees’ regular rate of pay, which shall not be less than the minimum wage.”66 The Court of Appeal has rejected a plaintiff’s claim that, as to a 45-second termination meeting he was summoned to attend, he should have received four hours of pay instead of the two hours of pay that he did receive. The Court of Appeal reasoned that on the day in question the plaintiff was scheduled for a meeting of unspecified length and so was not entitled to anything beyond the two-hour minimum.67 The Court of Appeal has also clarified that because reporting-time pay is due only when the employee has work for less than one-half the scheduled shift, an employer can schedule short meetings and pay for only the length of the meeting. The example the Court of Appeal gave was a meeting scheduled for one and one-half hours, but lasting only one hour. In that case, no reporting-pay would be due, the Court of Appeal said, because the employer furnished work for more than one-half the scheduled time.68 The traditional meaning of “report for work” is to show up at the workplace at the appointed time, ready to work. That certainly was the phrase’s meaning when the relevant Wage Order language was enacted, in 1947. But in 2019 an activist Court of Appeal decision held (at the pleadings stage) that employees potentially “report for work” if, while subject to an on-call schedule, they comply with an employer requirement to telephone two hours before
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