Litigating California Wage & Hour and Labor Code Class Actions

worked,” which is language absent from the FLSA. 227 The Armenta court also noted that Labor
Code Sections 221-223, which have no counterparts under the FLSA, make it illegal to secretly pay
employees less than the amount designated by statute or contract. 228 The court failed to explain,
however, why the violation of these particular Labor Code statutes signaled an intent to treat those
violations as minimum wage violations.
The Armenta decision affects California law in several ways. First, allowing a minimum wage claim
whenever there are some uncompensated work hours will allow employees who could not state a
claim for overtime an alternative basis to sue. For example, unionized employees whose overtime
claims are preempted by Section 301 of the Labor Management Relations Act may still be able to
sue under California law for unpaid minimum wages. Indeed, the plaintiffs in Armenta were
members of a union who had pleaded claims for overtime, but later abandoned those claims
because they recognized that those claims were preempted. 229 Minimum wage law claims, by
contrast, are generally not preempted given that they can be resolved entirely independently of a
collective bargaining agreement. 230
Second, employees who sue for minimum wage violations can recover liquidated damages under
Labor Code Section 1194.1, which are not available for other sorts of wage violations. If liquidated
damages are awarded, then employees will recover twice the minimum wage (which would
currently amount to $16 per hour) for each hour they can show they worked but received no pay.
Third, plaintiffs will be able to plead minimum wage claims in any case where they allege some
work time was unpaid. For example, in meal period cases where the employer is alleged to have
recorded meal periods automatically whether or not the employees actually took them, employees
may argue that they worked through the meal period, but were not paid for that work time. Those
facts might trigger minimum wage claims now. Similarly, a claim that an employee worked
controlled standby time that the employer erroneously treated as unpaid will now trigger a minimum
wage claim.
A more recent case issued by the very same panel that decided Armenta suggests that Armenta
may not apply in situations beyond its narrow facts. In Fitzgerald v. Skywest Airlines, Inc., 231 the
plaintiff was a flight attendant. Her governing contract called for her to receive $1.60 an hour for
“block time” while the aircraft is readied for flight, while passengers board and disembark, and for
flight standbys. On the whole, however, only a fraction of her hours were block time, the remainder
227
228
229
230
231
Armenta, 135 Cal. App. 4th at 323-24.
Id.
Id. at 318. Unionized employees’ overtime claims often fail because those employees generally work under a collective
bargaining agreement that provides premium pay for all hours worked, which then brings the employees within the
Labor Code Section 514 “collective bargaining exemption.”
Id.
155 Cal. App. 4th 411 (2007).
Seyfarth Shaw LLP | www.seyfarth.com Litigating California Wage & Hour Class Actions (12th Edition) 54