88 Litigating CA Wage & Hour Class and PAGA Actions (23rd Edition) Seyfarth Shaw LLP | www.seyfarth.com will consider (1) the practical administrative difficulty of recording the additional time; (2) the aggregate amount of compensable time; and (3) the regularity of the additional work.”432 Unfortunately, however, in a 2018 case, Troester v. Starbucks Corp., the California Supreme Court dealt a blow to the use of the de minimis doctrine in defending claims brought under the California Labor Code. In Troester, a Starbucks supervisor sought class-wide recovery of wages for time spent working after clocking out each day. Starbucks’ computer software required the plaintiff to clock out on every closing shift before initiating the software’s “close store procedure” on a computer terminal in the back office. After the plaintiff completed this task, he activated the alarm, exited the store, and locked the front door. The plaintiff also occasionally reopened the store to allow employees to retrieve items they left behind, waited with employees for their rides to arrive, or brought into the store items of patio furniture mistakenly left outside.433 The tasks plaintiff performed after clocking out took four to ten minutes each day. Over 17 months of employment, the plaintiff’s unpaid time totaled approximately 12 hours and 50 minutes.434 Starbucks argued that the extra minutes that the plaintiff worked each day were de minimis and thus not compensable. Starbucks noted that it would be administratively difficult to capture the time that the plaintiff spent exiting the store and locking up, because he had to first clock out on a computer terminal inside the store.435 Troester noted that the Labor Code and the Wage Orders often provide employees with a greater level of protection than federal law.436 Troester found that the requirement under the Labor Code and the Wage Orders that employees be paid for “all hours worked” was more protective than the FLSA, and thus ruled that “the California statues and Wage Orders have not adopted the federal de minimis doctrine.”437 Nonetheless, Troester left open the possibility that some narrower version of the doctrine might apply in wage and hour cases: [A]lthough California has not adopted the federal de minimis doctrine, does some version of the doctrine nonetheless apply to wage and hour claims as a matter of state law? We hold that the relevant Wage Order and statutes do not permit application of the de minimis rule on the facts given to us by the Ninth Circuit, where the employer required the employee to work “off the clock” several minutes per shift. We do not decide whether there are circumstances where compensable time is so minute or irregular that it is unreasonable to expect the time to be recorded . . .. We decline to decide whether a de minimis principle may ever apply to wage and hour claims given the wide range of scenarios in which this issue arises.438 432 Id. at 1063. 433 Id. at 835-36. 434 Id. at 836. 435 Id. 436 Id. at 839-40. 437 Id. at 842. 438 Id. at 835, 843.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTkwMTQ4