California moves to modify law letting workers sue employers

Ok, the article says it costs companies billions. But, maybe that's the right amount? There's no evidence presented that billions is the wrong amount for the cost of mistreating workers.

I'm not saying it definitely is, I just thinks it's shady to frame it as "think of the mega corporations!" Why does the paper assume that it's a negative?

Some quick examples:

Historically you could do time to the nearest 10th of an hour - this was allowed explicitly under federal guidance on tracking time, and California had a case (Sees Candy) that said you could do it if applied “in such a manner that it will not result, over a period of time, in failure to compensate the employees properly for all the time they have actually worked.” which basically meant it was neutral to the employer so the employer didn't benefit from the policy.

There was a recent PAGA case (these are lawyer driven cases) against Loma Linda University Medical Center. After hiring lots of experts, they did a study of the effect of timesheet rounding to the nearest 10th of an hour (ie, 10.1 hrs worked) and found that 51.7% were paid for more time then they worked (by small amounts), 1.1% were basically paid exactly what they worked, and the rest got paid (slightly) less on average. Even though rounding to the nearest 10th was allowed by the Feds, and allowed explicitly in a previous case, under this Paga claim the medical center was found to have committed a HUGE list of crimes including wage theft, failure to pay overtime, waiting time penalties and will be liable for huge attorney fee awards.

Another case I saw was that the zip code on an address did not have the +4 digits so was not considered a complete address. Again, the penalty they were looking for was on EVERY paycheck missing the +4 digit zip code (this either settled or did not succeed I don't think, but just an example of the types of claims coming in under PAGA).

Another wave is going to be work from home costs where there is a conflict between the IRS (doesn't want non-taxed reimbursements of expenses) and California (very broad definition).

The biggest employer complaint I see is just that the CA DOL will not actually provide guidance on anything. Even basic things like vacation accrual cap rules - no guidance is provided and in the last years guidance has been withdrawn. Timesheet rounding - if the DOL would just issue a sensible regulation then my impression is software folks doing payroll systems would program it in and employers don't care about things like timesheet rounding, they just need to know if they need to track in 10ths of an hour or 100ths of an hour.

Would have been interesting to see how folks would have voted on the ballot measure - I thought it very unlikely to pass. But it had good ideas. Currently actual issues going through DLSE take FOREVER - this is bad for everyone. By this I mean things that should be resolved in weeks take literally years. It's ridiculous. The ballot measure would have sped that up. But the attorney driven PAGA stuff I think was going to be cut down pretty heavily in tradeoff. Also, under PAGA a very small amount goes to the employee themselves.

In terms of dollars - PAGA has no class certification barrier and average attorney fee awards run about $300K - $400K per case. All these are rough estimates. Employers spend roughly that again on their own attorney's (so think another $300K). Employer groups claim much larger numbers. Either way a big chunk goes to lawyers on all sides (600K), another big chunk goes to the state (where it is loaned the general fund rather than used to enforce labor laws). The next big chunk goes to employees. But in terms of total $ not as much as you'd expect given overall costs.

The deal (skimming it) looks potentially reasonable. If they can get non litigation resolutions to go faster through DLSE / LWDA that would be HUGE for everyone. One good thing about the govt - the workers there don't have much incentive to drag stuff on forever. The attorneys in a fees case absolutely do want to drag it out to 300 - 400K in fees so just a ton of extra work for everyone (judges, employee attorneys, internal staff etc).

Is it just me, or is this sentence difficult to parse?:

> A last-minute political compromise has headed off an effort to repeal a California law allowing workers to sue employers for workplace violations

I’m not sure what happened and who it benefits (also, since when does anyone say “headed off?”).

It seems like there is an existing law. Some lobbyists got enough signatures to hold a referendum via the November ballot on whether to repeal the existing law. They promised to withdraw the referendum if compromise legislation is passed. Now Governor Newsom has negotiated some acceptable compromise legislation with those groups. The article does not mention whether the state Congress has voted on the legislation yet.

The proposed compromise legislation increases penalty money to employees, from 25% to 35%. But it limits initiation of the litigation to employees directly impacted by the violations. The article does not mention how this differs from the current law.

Overall, this is such a horribly written article that one wonders if it’s intentionally obfuscatory.

This is one of those articles that really highlights how ineffective American journalism has become. First off, what the fuck are they even talking about? Each paragraph is loaded with vague references to other local political phenomenon that mean nothing to most Californian readers, let alone the national readers of a NYT article on the economy. Second, give me some context. Any! How do California's laws compare to comparable economies, like New York or Germany? Are these law uniquely onerous? Run of the mill?

And the quotes. Go back and read the quotes. "This package provides meaningful reform" says one. “This proposal maintains strong protections for workers" says another. I, personally, do not have a degree on journalism, so I can not be sure if they are required to study rhetoric, but would someone please inform the highly educated staff of the New York Times that we are all well aware that, given the opportunity, professional advocates for a given cause can produce 3-4 sentences of drivel in support of that cause. We do not need constant evidence of this fact.

Labor takes advantage of tools to enforce rules that capital must abide by, capital moves to remove the tools.