18th Annual Workplace Class Action Report - 2022 Edition

236 Annual Workplace Class Action Litigation Report: 2022 Edition the end of the week in which the wages are earned.” Id . at 3. The Court found that Plaintiff sufficiently alleged a violation of § 191, as Plaintiff’s complaint claimed that Defendant paid wages to manual workers every two weeks. Plaintiff further alleged that Defendant violated § 195(3) of the NYLL because it failed to provide wage statement that specified the amount of hours worked per week. The Court noted that the plain text of § 195(3) indicated that it “does not require that wage statements be furnished on a weekly basis or provide a breakdown of how many hours an employee works per week.” Id . at 12. Therefore, the Court concluded that Plaintiff failed to state a claim for failure to provide accurate wage statement. For these reasons, the Court granted in part and denied in part Defendant’s motion to dismiss. Santos, et al. v. United Parcel Service , 2021 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 106357 (N.D. Cal. July 7, 2021). Plaintiff, a non-exempt distribution center employee, filed a class action alleging that Defendant violated the California Labor Code (“CLC”) by failing to provide timely and uninterrupted meal and rest periods to its non-exempt employees, including Preload Part-Time Supervisors ("Preload PTS"). Plaintiff previously had filed a motion for class certification of several subclasses pursuant to Rule 23, which the Court granted in part. Plaintiff asserted that Defendant’s wage statements lumped in meal break codes with other "unpaid work" time in the time management system. Id. at *3. Plaintiff contended that it was impossible for an employee to confirm from UPS’s records if a recording under this code was in fact a meal break, or some other entry. For purposes of class certification, the Court reasoned that whether Defendant’s time records complied with the applicable Wage Order presented a common question of fact that predominated over individual issues. Id . at *25. The Court noted that the form of the wage statement was uniform for all members of the putative class and therefore whether the statement was sufficiently clear and specific as to satisfy § 226(a) of the CLC and Wage Order No. 9 was a matter that could be adjudicated in one stroke such that certification was appropriate. After the Court granted class certification, Defendant filed the a motion for summary judgment as to the certified wage statement subclass, and the Court granted the motion. The Court found that Defendant’s wage statements provide sufficient information to comply with § 226(a), as the statements disclosed if the worker received a meal period premium and, if so, how much. Further, should the employee require a time breakdown, the statements provided a "current pay rate" and a gross, lump sum figure for meal premium payments, which they could then divide by their current pay rate to arrive at the number of hours of meal premium payments they received for a particular pay period. Id . at *19. The Court determined that an employee could ascertain necessary information with simple math to find the end result required. For these reasons, the Court granted Defendant’s motion for summary judgment as to the wage statement subclass. Ward, et al. v. United Airlines, Inc., 2021 U.S. App. LEXIS 2777 (9th Cir. Feb. 2, 2021). In these consolidated cases, Plaintiffs, a group of pilots and flight attendants who resided in California, brought putative two wage & hour class actions alleging that Defendant violated the wage statement provision of § 226 of the California Labor Code, which required Defendant to provide its employees with a wage statement with certain information, including the name and address of the legal entity that was the employer. Plaintiffs alleged that Defendant’s wage statements failed to comply with § 226’s requirements because they did not provide the required address for Defendant as the statements listed only a post office. The parties filed cross-motions for summary judgment, and both District Courts granted summary judgment for Defendant on the basis that § 226 applies only to employees who work principally in California, which was not true of either the pilots or the flight attendants. Plaintiffs appealed and upon the Ninth Circuit’s request, the California Supreme Court clarified the issue of whether § 226 applied to Plaintiffs given that they spent most of their time working outside of California. In Ward v. United Airlines, Inc. , 9 Cal. 5th 732, (Cal. 2020), the California Supreme Court held that § 226 applied to Plaintiffs because they were based in California for work purposes. The California Supreme Court set forth a set of principles defining § 226’s permissible reach (the " Ward test”). Defendant argued that even though the California Supreme Court had clarified that § 226 applied in these cases, the Ninth Circuit should still affirm the judgments in its favor. In particular, Defendant challenged the validity of applying § 226 to Plaintiffs under the Ward test. Defendant argued that federal law precluded California from applying its wage statement law to interstate transportation workers who were based in California and did not perform a majority of their work in any one state. Defendant’s argument rested on three sources of federal law, including the dormant commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution, the Airline Deregulation Act, and the Railway Labor Act. The Ninth Circuit rejected Defendant’s reliance on each of these potentially preemptive sources of federal law and reversed and remanded the grants of summary judgment in favor of Defendant. The Ninth Circuit held that employees