On April 12, more than three years after granting review, the California Supreme Court issued its decision in Brinker Restaurants v. Superior Court, 12 C.D.O.S. 3796. The court had granted review in Brinker to determine, among other things, whether an employer is strictly liable when an employee does not take a meal period that complies with the rules of Labor Code §512 and the Wage Orders, and if not, whether class certification was properly denied. Expectations were high that the decision would settle these issues, whose uncertainty had led to hundreds of millions of dollars in wage-and-hour class action settlements over the past decade.

Brinker is notable in part because it is a unanimous opinion that carefully charts a middle ground between the extremes advocated by each side. It rejected strict liability for meal period claims, but spells out affirmative steps employers must take to meet their legal obligations. This has led both employer and employee advocates to declare victory, even though the court rejected legal theories more friendly to each side. Brinker is less satisfying on the class certification score, because it declined to reach the difficult issue of whether the garden variety meal period claims presented in the case should or should not have been certified. Instead, it remanded that issue to the trial court. Here, too, however, both employee and employer advocates have read encouraging signs in Brinker‘s text.

California Meal and Rest Period Obligations

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