86 Litigating CA Wage & Hour Class and PAGA Actions (24th Edition) Seyfarth Shaw LLP | www.seyfarth.com systematically underpaid.424 During the case, Loma Linda University Medical Center’s own evidence showed that Plaintiff was not paid for 6.3 weighted hours, and over 5,000 employees were not paid for all time worked. The Court of Appeals in Woodworth denied Loma Linda University Medical Center’s motion for summary adjudication on Plaintiff’s individual rounding claim and the PAGA group’s rounding claim, holding that rounding policies should not be permitted, and employees must be paid for all time worked. The court noted that given the advances in technology, employers are more easily and precisely able to capture all time worked by employees, and must therefore compensate employees for all time. Given the Camp and Woodworth decisions, employers are now on notice that they face potential liability if they choose to round employee time, even if they use a rounding practice that is fair and neutral on its face, particularity if they have a timekeeping system that can capture the exact times worked by employees. However, in granting the petition to review the Camp decision, the California Supreme Court specifically noted that Camp can only be cited for its persuasive value and for the limited purpose of establishing the existence of a conflict in authority that would in turn allow trial courts to choose between sides of any such conflict. While neutral time rounding technically remains lawful in California (for the time being), rounding is not lawful when applied to meal periods. In Donohue v. AMN Services, LLC, the California Supreme Court reversed a Court of Appeal decision that meal period times can be rounded.425 Donohue held that rounding is improper in the meal period context, as even a slightly short meal period is not consistent with the requirement to provide a full 30minute meal period. The general neutrality standard set forth in See’s Candy thus does not apply in the meal period context. D. Compensability of Time Spent in Security Checks Plaintiffs’ lawyers have long argued that California retailers must compensate nonexempt employees for time spent undergoing security inspections as they leave the store. A 2014 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Integrity Staffing Solutions v. Busk, held that the time that warehouse employees spent waiting to undergo security screenings was not compensable under the FLSA. The Supreme Court reasoned that the screening activity was not “integral and indispensable to the principal activities that an employee is employed to perform,” and thus was exempted from FLSA requirements by the Portal to Portal Act of 1947.426 California, however, has no exemption analogous to that applied in Busk, and makes an employee’s time compensable whenever the employee is “subject to the control of an employer” or is “suffered or permitted to work.”427 While California employers had hoped that reasoning similar to the Busk holding might apply to Labor Code claims, recent decisions from the California Supreme Court and Ninth Circuit have forced employers to check their hopes at the door. 424 Id. 425 Donohue v. AMN Services, LLC, 11 Cal. 5th 58 (2021). 426 Integrity Staffing Solutions, Inc. v. Busk, 574 U.S. 27 (2014). 427 Morillion v. Royal Packing Co., 22 Cal. 4th 575, 582 (2000).
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