Co-authored by Jacob Oslick and Timothy Rusche

California requires written waivers if an employee misses a second meal break, right? Not exactly, clarified the California Court of Appeal in Fayerweather v. Comcast Corp. Instead, a waiver only is needed if the employer makes an employee miss a second meal break and not if the break is voluntarily skipped. The court also reaffirmed that off-the-clock class actions require proof of a uniform, companywide policy that violates the law.

The Fayerweahter plaintiffs were Comcast service technicians. They installed cable, internet, and phone service in homes and businesses. Much like customers whom Comcast hoped would take a break from the grind to watch TV and surf the web, Comcast policies directed technicians to take breaks, required them to fill out waivers if they skipped a second meal break, and obligated them to accurately record their hours worked. However, because technicians spent their days in the field, Comcast couldn’t know which of them actually took their TV timeouts.

The plaintiffs seized on this. Like the do-it-yourselfer who ignores direction and hangs a flat screen with the wrong screws, they alleged that their failure to follow policy and complete meal break waivers proved they were denied breaks. They argued that a device the company provided to communicate their status in the field more accurately reflected their hours than time records they had completed themselves.

The court panned the show and affirmed the decision to cancel the series. In brief:

  • The plaintiffs admitted that, under Comcast policy, they were supposed to sign written waivers every time they chose to skip a second meal break. They claimed that they neglected to, and insisted that this failure violated Labor Code § 512. The Court held that the law, unlike Comcast policy, didn’t require written waivers, and that “[i]f an employee voluntarily chooses to continue working through a provided meal break, no waiver is required.”  And, because figuring out whether they chose or were forced to miss a break would “require individual analysis of every instance,” this theory wasn’t appropriate for class treatment.
  • The plaintiffs also sought class certification on the grounds that Comcast didn’t maintain a formal policy to provide premium pay for denied breaks. However, as the Court noted, Labor Code § 226.7 only requires that premium pay get paid; it does not require a written policy to pay it. Whether the plaintiffs were actually denied breaks , or voluntarily skipped them, remained an individualized issue.
  • The plaintiffs further alleged that they widely underreported their hours and that entries from a communication device called TechNet showed that Comcast should have known about this underreporting. The Court found that TechNet was used to communicate about availability, not to track time, and that there was no evidence that the plaintiffs’ self-reported time records were less reliable than their TechNet entries. Nor did it find “substantial evidence point[ing] to a uniform, companywide policy” of encouraging technicians to underreport their time. Accordingly, the Court found that TechNet’s data could not be used to impute knowledge to Comcast, or to justify findings on a class-wide basis.

Employer Take-Aways

Though Fayerweather currently is an unreported decision, which limits its precedential value, it establishes that meal break waivers are different than voluntary decisions to skip breaks, and reiterates that class certification requires evidence of uniformly applied, unlawful company policy. Now that’s a show worth tuning into.