No Class Certification in Labor Code Suit Against Starbucks
A federal court in California has refused to certify four classes of Starbucks
employees in litigation alleging that its rest break policy and scheduling
practices, and meal period policy and practices violated the state’s Labor Code
and Unfair Competition Law. Cummings v. Starbucks Corp., No. 12-6345 (C.D. Cal., decided March 24, 2014).
As to the proposed meal break class, the court found that the plaintiff’s
“second theory of liability—that Starbucks had a practice of failing to provide
timely meal breaks—does not present a common question of law” because
“there is no common answer as to why employees took a late meal break,
and individualized inquiries into each late meal break would be required.” The
court also found as to this proposed class that the plaintiff’s claims did not
meet the typicality requirement because her alleged late meal break claims
were due not to a defective policy, but “because of unique circumstances in
the store.”
Regarding the predominance requirement, the court found “conflicting
case law as to whether Starbucks’s liability can result solely from its unlawful
policy, as the California Court of Appeal cases suggest, or whether liability
results from the actual failure to provide a rest break, as the [federal] district
court cases suggest.” The unlawful policy was the company’s apparent
failure to include certain language—“or major fraction thereof”—in its
policy as required under California law. Relying on Ninth Circuit precedent
which applied the reasoning from the state law cases but noted that “it is an
abuse of discretion for the district court to rely on uniform policies ‘to the
near exclusion of other relevant factors touching on predominance,’” the
court acknowledged the “possibility that the predominance requirement
may not be met, despite the existence of a facially defective policy.” In this
regard, the court found that the evidence “does not indicate that Starbucks’s
facially defective rest period policy was consistently applied to deprive class
members of a second rest period.” Thus the court found the plaintiff’s rest
break claims not amenable to class certification because they did not satisfy
the predominance requirement.
Because the Unfair Competition Law claims were derivative of the Labor Code
claims, the court also found this class not amenable to class certification.
Issue 518
