It’s a mixed bag for certain California correctional employees today at the Supreme Court in their class action seeking additional pay for pre- and post-work time. The losers in Stoetzl v. Department of Human Resources are union-represented employees whose collective bargaining agreements were approved by the Legislature and signed by the Governor.
Unrepresented employees are partial winners. The court’s 5-2 opinion by Justice Ming Chin holds they might be in line for additional compensation for what the court calls “duty-integrated walk time,” which includes “being briefed before the start of a shift, briefing relief staff at the end of a shift, checking out and checking back in mandated safety equipment, putting on and removing such equipment, and submitting to searches at various security checkpoints within the facility.” However, they don’t get more pay for “entry-exit walk time,” such as traveling back and forth between the outermost gate of the prison facility and their work posts within the facility. Unionized employees won’t get additional compensation for either type of walk time.
As to the unrepresented employees’ claims, the court says it is “confronted . . . with [the products of] two competing statutory schemes,” an Industrial Welfare Commission wage order and a California Department of Human Resources pay scale manual. The court concludes that the manual’s narrower definition of compensable work time, based on federal law, “must be treated as a statutorily authorized exception” to the wage order because the Department “was the recipient of a more specific delegation.”
Justice Goodwin Liu concurs and dissents in an opinion joined by Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar. Asserting the majority opinion “takes insufficient account of our long history of deference to IWC wage orders,” the separate opinion argues that both represented and unrepresented employees should be able to pursue minimum wage compensation claims for entry-exit walk time.
The court affirms in part and reverses in part the First District, Division Four, Court of Appeal. The appellate court differed from the Supreme Court in approving the unrepresented employees’ claims for entry-exit walk time.
