The Blog: Minimum Wage

If you own an apartment or hotel/motel and provide free lodging to your employee(s), pay attention. Otherwise, the rest of you California employers can take a breather.
A common practice in the apartment/hotel/motel industry is to allow the manager to live in one of your apartments or hotel/motel room rent free. Also common is the belief this “free rent” is part …

Here’s another reason for California employers to know their California minimum wage obligations and to comply with them.
For a while now, a failure to pay minimum wage carried with it the penalty of having to pay not only the minimum wages owed but “liquidated damages” in the same amount (LC 1194.2).  Thus, if an employer failed to pay $250 in …

Now that the California minimum wage will increase to $9/hour on July 1, 2014 and to $10/hour on January 1, 2016, California employers must gear up for pay raises to their exempt employees.  That’s a 12.5% legally mandated pay raise in 2014 and another 11.1% in 2016.
How so you ask?

A California Court of Appeals has put another nail in the coffin for piece rate systems in California.  Bluford v. Safeway Stores, Inc. (5/24/2013) ruled California employers are “required to separately compensate for rest periods” and cannot compensate for them  by including them in a piece rate. 
Safeway’s Mileage Based Piece Rate System
Safeway paid its delivery drivers based on miles …

With new California “wage and hour” cases coming out almost daily one should not be surprised that many previously unchallenged well-established California employer wage and hour practices are now being called into question.  One of those practices is piece rate compensation.
What Is a Piece Rate?
Most employers pay employees either on an hourly, salary, or commission basis, or some combination thereof.  …