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Infractions are 200 dollars per infraction for every employee, and are religiously perused by private law firms.
For example, if a company with 100 employees let employees take lunch whenever they wanted, they would be sued for 20K per day this occurred since employers are required to require employees take lunch within 5 hours of starting the day, meaning they could easily look at millions of dollars of fines for trying to be nice to employees that a private law firm would sue them over.
And in the end the majority of the settlement will go to the law firm and the actual person who sued will get 1/100th of the remaining amount for all this trouble.
> employers are required to require employees take lunch within 5 hours of starting the day
This seems like a misrepresentation of the relevant statutes.
Per Brinker Restaurant Corporation v. Superior Court,
> In a unanimous opinion authored by Associate Justice Kathryn M. Werdegar, the court explained that neither state statutes nor the orders of the Industrial Welfare Commission (IWC) compel an employer to ensure employees cease all work during meal periods. Instead, under state law an employer must provide its employees an uninterrupted 30-minute duty-free period during which the employee is at liberty to come and go as he or she pleases.
https://www.courts.ca.gov/17489.htm
In other words: if the employee has the option of taking that half hour break at an appropriate time of day, then I don't see a lawsuit as being justified unless there's legislation from the past 12 years (very plausible) that renders this precedent obsolete.
> In compliance with California labor laws, nonexempt employees are entitled to an unpaid meal or lunch break lasting a minimum of 30 minutes for shifts exceeding five hours. This break, which should commence before the completion of the fifth hour of work, can be waived only if the workday does not surpass six hours.
This means Employees are basically required to take the meal break before 5 hours, because a more forgiving policy of take it whenever you want will incur a PAGA lawsuit that will be settled due to the extreme potential fines.
You're not wrong here.
> This means Employees are basically required to take the meal break before 5 hours
I don't think this characterization is supported, though. For one, the law only applies to non-exempt (usually: non-salaried) employees, and for another, case law (typically citing Brinker) consistently holds that the employer is not required to enforce that the employee takes the full meal break at the appropriate time, merely that the employer provide opportunity to do so. The actual opinion from Brinker states:
> Specifically, we conclude that (1) while employers cannot impede, discourage or dissuade employees from taking rest periods, they need only provide, not ensure, rest periods are taken; (2) employers need only authorize and permit rest periods every four hours or major fraction thereof and they need not, where impracticable, be in the middle of each work period; (3) employers are not required to provide a meal period for every five consecutive hours worked; (4) while employers cannot impede, discourage or dissuade employees from taking meal periods, they need only provide them and not ensure they are taken; and (5) while employers cannot coerce, require or compel employees to work off the clock, they can only be held liable for employees working off the clock if they knew or should have known they were doing so.
https://casetext.com/case/brinker-restaurant-corp-v-superior...
One interesting application in case law that I found is that apparently being on-call during a meal break is sufficient to result in a violation.
https://casetext.com/analysis/california-supreme-court-no-on...
There are even stranger violations, apparently asking people to take covid tests before coming to work during the pandemic is a potential violation, and making an typo on paychecks is one I read in an article, even if the typo had no harm.
Heck, a business employing 2 people should have a legal advisor. If I were starting a startup with my own money, a lawyer would be employee number one.
Why do you think we should be so much more lenient with companies that knowingly break the law and make life worse for thousands of less fortunate people?
They can go against a whole bunch of laws, crush the competition doing the right this and then pay a fine that amounts to nothing as they hold onto their position.
This happens a lot in customer facing medicine space. Make wild claims, make hundreds of millions of profit and then get fined a few million at the tail end of it all. Rinse, repeat.
If they made one million would this fine be appropriate?
All of these comments getting upset because they're comparing it to all of Amazaon's revenue from all business units everywhere are either missing the point or they didn't actually read the article.
If an individual jurisdiction started levying fines against companies for local violations as a percentage of their entire revenue across the company, the only logical response would be for those companies to shut down and pull out of those locations.
All of these calls to calculate fines for small, local violations based on global revenues are absolutely insane.
I'd actually prefer that people go to jail over it. I would like executives and middle management to be afraid of violating labor law. If you have 3 employees, I could see ignorance being an excuse. However, these are giant corporations that have the economies of scale for this to be really profitable (and inhibit competition) and the resources to make sure they stay on the right side of the law.
Abuses of this nature are reported on social media by workers at Amazon warehouses everywhere.
We talk of "overcriminalization."
On the other hand if laws are applied to their favorite hacker (think one who committed suicide) then the case should not even see the day in court because those laws are of course unlawful.