Employee Pay: On-Call Shifts and Reporting Time Pay
Putting employees on-call or requiring them to call in before shifts could raise employee pay issues. Businesses that experience fluctuations in foot traffic, calls, or demand, face the difficulty of predicting employee schedules. Since needs change quickly, it could be difficult to anticipate how many employees the business needs on any given day or part of the day. Many businesses choose to address this difficulty by scheduling employees for on-call shifts to ensure that there are workers on stand-by who are ready to step in on short notice if the need arises. Depending on your business’s particular rules and practices related to these on-call shifts, you may have employee pay violations if on-call employees are not paid “reporting time” pay. A California Court of Appeal in the case of Ward v. Tilly’s, Inc., addressed the question of what it means to “report to work” for purposes of determining whether the employee is owed “reporting time pay” under the wage order (Wage Order 7 that governs the mercantile industry in this case). In that case, Tilly’s scheduled its employees for a … Continue reading
What is PAGA?
“Paga” means “pay” in Spanish, which is an apt acronym for the California Labor Code Private Attorneys General Act (“PAGA”). In California, PAGA authorizes aggrieved employees to file lawsuits to recover civil penalties on behalf of themselves, other employees, and the State of California for an employer’s Labor Code violations. The aggrieved employees generally retain 25% of any civil penalty recovered and the remaining 75% goes to the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency (LWDA). Additionally, the aggrieved employee may bring separate claims for penalties the are directly recoverable by the employee. In short, a PAGA claim allows an employee to step into the state’s shoes to enforce certain labor code violations as it applies to the employee and other employees. Since employees who prevail on PAGA claims could recover attorney’s fees and costs in addition to the penalties as they apply to each employee, an employer’s potential exposure on PAGA claims are quite significant. Sending a written notice of a PAGA claim by certified mail to an employer (and online to the State of California) is the first step … Continue reading