When California employees bring lawsuits alleging minimum wage, overtime, meal period or rest period violations, they typically bring additional claims that are purportedly “derivative” of these substantive claims. One of these derivative claims is for wage statement (i.e., paystub) violations, alleging that because the employee was paid not all wages he or she allegedly earned, the wage statements he or she was provided were not accurate.
The maximum penalty for a wage statement violation under the California Labor Code is $4,000 per employee. With such a significant potential penalty, it is no wonder that plaintiffs’ attorneys typically tack on these types of claims, especially in proposed class actions, driving up the potential value of a case.
On May 8, 2018, however, the California Court of Appeal published an employer-friendly decision that could operate to defeat these claims in many cases – if it is not reversed by the California Supreme Court.
In Maldonado v. Epsilon Plastics, Inc., ___ Cal.App.5th ___ (B278022, Apr. 18, 2018), the Court of Appeal confirmed that a wage statement claim fails as a matter of law when it is based on the alleged failure to show all wages purportedly “earned” but the wage statements accurately reflect the wages paid to the employee. The Court agreed with the employer’s “commonsense position that the pay stubs were accurate in that they correctly reflected . . . the pay received” and held that a failure to pay wages “does not mandate that [employees] also receive penalties for the wage statements which accurately reflected the[] compensation” they were paid.
The Court of Appeal’s decision in Maldonado is a welcome one for employers that have had to face wage statement claims that are tacked on by plaintiffs’ lawyers for the purpose of increasing potential exposure. Because this is the first published opinion directly deciding this issue, employers now have the tool necessary to seek to strike these claims.
Of course, it is possible that the California Supreme Court will review Maldonado. If it were to do so, it would not be entirely surprising for the Court to reverse the decision, as the Supreme Court has done in other employment cases in recent years where the Court of Appeal had issued employer-friendly interpretations of the California Labor Code.