222 | 2024 Cal-Peculiarities ©2024 Seyfarth Shaw LLP www.seyfarth.com Yet some courts have held that employers cannot invoke the CBA exemption against overtime claims—even when the plaintiff earns at least 130% of the minimum wage—if some other represented employee earns wages below that level. Several federal district court decisions thus refused to apply the CBA overtime exemption even though the plaintiffs themselves enjoyed all the described benefits of a CBA.225 These courts both relied mainly on a mechanical linguistic analysis. They noted that section 514 applies to “an employee” covered by a CBA so long as the CBA covers certain employment terms for “the employees” and provides 130% of the minimum wage “for those employees.” Parsing this language, these courts concluded: “The plural term ‘those employees’ refers back to the statute’s earlier use of ‘the employees’ [instead of ‘that employee’] which … means all employees covered by the CBA.”226 Neither court, though thus placing crucial reliance on the use of the singular versus the plural of the term “employee,” acknowledged a cardinal rule of construction appearing in the Labor Code: “The singular number includes the plural, and the plural the singular.”227 7.7.7 Truck drivers transporting goods in interstate commerce Commercial truck drivers who operate large trucks to transport goods in interstate commerce are generally exempt from California overtime law, just as they are under federal law.228 7.7.8 RLA preemption or exemption California’s pesky “minimum wage paid separately for each hour worked” doctrine is preempted by collective bargaining agreements entered into under the Railway Labor Act, which also applies to airlines. The Court of Appeal thus upheld a summary judgment against airline attendants challenging the airline’s practice of paying, pursuant to a CBA, just $1.60 an hour for their time waiting for an airline to be readied for flight. The Court of Appeal held that “the IWC order [mandating a minimum wage] was preempted by the RLA and that enforcement of the IWC order would burden interstate commerce.”229 The RLA has not worked as a defense, however, with respect to section 226 claims for inadequate wage statements. In a 2020 case, the California Supreme Court considered whether an airline could rely on the RLA-based exemption that appears in Wage Order 9, for transportation workers, in a lawsuit by airline crew members alleging that the employer’s wage statements failed to list the employer address and to state hours worked and applicable wage rates. The question was whether the plaintiff crew members fell outside the protections of section 226 because they were covered by a CBA entered into in accordance with the RLA. Wage Order 9 provides that it does not “cover those employees who have entered into a collective bargaining agreement under and in accordance with the provisions of the Railway Labor Act, 45 U.S.C. Sections 151 et seq.” The Supreme Court reasoned that reliance on this exemption did not shield the employer from a section 226 suit, because section 226 itself contains no similar exemption: “Despite numerous opportunities, … the Legislature has never followed the IWC’s lead and enacted an exemption to Section 226 for employees operating under a collective bargaining agreement entered under the Railway Labor Act. We see no basis for importing the Railway Labor Act exemption when the Legislature itself has not chosen to do so.”230 7.7.9 Agricultural workers The federal FLSA exempts “agricultural work” from the overtime rules, but here, as elsewhere, California is outstanding in the wage and hour field. Wage Order 14 entitles agricultural employees to daily overtime for hours worked in excess of ten hours in a day. And, under 2016 legislation, gradual annual changes—beginning in 2019 and culminating in 2025—will give all agricultural workers the same daily overtime and daily double-time
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