On May 2, 2016, the Ninth Circuit issued a published opinion in Corbin v. Time Warner Entertainment-Advance/Newhouse Partnership. The Corbin Court best summarized the action in its opening sentence: “This case turns on $15.02 and one minute.” The “$15.02” represented the wages the plaintiff claimed he lost over a period of time as a result of the company’s neutral time-rounding policy. And the “one minute” represented the amount of off-the-clock time that the plaintiff worked, which the Court held was de minimis and, therefore, not compensable.
Federal and California authorities have found that an employer complies with the law if it has a facially neutral time rounding policy – one that rounds time both up and down – and if, in practice, the policy is also neutral.
In Corbin, there was no dispute that Time Warner had a facially neutral rounding policy. Rather, Corbin argued that rounding was only permissible under circumstances that would create undue burdens on employers.
Following the California Court of Appeal’s decision in See’s Candy Shops, Inc. v. Superior Court, the Ninth Circuit rejected the employee’s argument that rounding violates California law that requires employees to be paid all wages due for each pay period where the employer does not engage in a “‘mini actuarial process at the time of payroll’ and reconcile the rounding with actual time punches.” The Court held that such a view was too short-sighted: “Employers use rounding policies to calculate wages efficiently; sometimes, in any given pay period, employees come out ahead and sometimes they come out behind, but the policy is meant to average out in the long-term.” The Ninth Circuit also found that such an interpretation would render rounding practices useless because “employers would have to ‘un-round’ every employee’s time stamps for every pay period to verify that the rounding policy had benefitted every employee.”
The employee’s records in Corbin demonstrated that sometimes rounding worked in his favor, and sometimes it did not. The Ninth Circuit determined that is exactly how rounding is intended to work and, thus, found that the company’s time-rounding practice was neutral in its application.
Also at issue in the case was the de minimis doctrine, which permits the non-payment of wages when the employer meets a three-prong test where courts are instructed to “consider (1) the practical administrative difficulty of recording the additional time; (2) the aggregate amount of compensable time; and (3) the regularity of the additional work.”
The plaintiff if Corbin – a call center employee – claimed that on one occasion he logged into call software before he clocked in for timekeeping purposes, although at all other times he clocked in before starting the program. The employee claimed that Time Warner should have known about this one-time log-in issue and compensated him for it because it had access to the records. The Ninth Circuit rejected this assertion: “Corbin’s contention that the de minimis doctrine does not apply because [Time Warner] could ascertain the exact log-in/out times by scouring its computer records is baseless; the de minimis doctrine is designed to allow employers to forego just such an arduous task.”
The Ninth Circuit also found that Corbin’s proposed standard would require employers to undermine their policies “prohibiting off-the-clock work by proactively searching out and compensating violations.” And because there was only one minute at issue and it was an irregular practice, the de minimis doctrine applied.
The Ninth Circuit’s opinion reaffirms the long-standing practice of rounding employees’ time so long as it is done in an even-handed manner. The Corbin Court’s opinion also confirms that employers are not required to scavenge through their records to ensure that any off-the-clock work did not occur, and that they need not compensate employees for de minimis time.
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