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from the all-work-and-no-pay-makes-Jack-a-litigious-boy dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following (paywalled) story:
July 26, 2018
Starbucks Corp. must pay employees for off-the-clock work such as closing and locking stores, the California Supreme Court ruled on Thursday in a decision that could have broad implications for companies that employ workers paid by the hour across the state.
The decision is a departure from a federal standard that gives employers greater leeway to deny workers’ compensation for short tasks, such as putting on a uniform, that are performed before they clock in or after they clock out.
More details are available from pbs.org:
The ruling came in a lawsuit by a Starbucks employee, Douglas Troester, who argued that he was entitled to be paid for the time he spent closing the store after he had clocked out.
Troester said he activated the store alarm, locked the front door and walked co-workers to their cars — tasks that required him to work for four to 10 additional minutes a day.
An attorney for Starbucks referred comment to the company. Starbucks did not immediately have comment.
A U.S. District Court rejected Troester’s lawsuit on the grounds that the time he spent on those tasks was minimal. But the California Supreme Court said a few extra minutes of work each day could “add up.”
Troester was seeking payment for 12 hours and 50 minutes of work over a 17-month period. At $8 an hour, that amounts to $102.67, the California Supreme Court said.
“That is enough to pay a utility bill, buy a week of groceries, or cover a month of bus fares,” Associate Justice Goodwin Liu wrote. “What Starbucks calls ‘de minimis’ is not de minimis at all to many ordinary people who work for hourly wages.”
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 29 2018, @11:55AM (2 children)
Yes. [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Sunday July 29 2018, @02:44PM (1 child)
That whole apportionment thing seems just a little silly. If every American is taxed on the same scale, then taxes are automagically "apportioned" according to wealth, population, or just about anything else you care to scale the taxes to. Of course, the problem as I see it is, not all Americans are taxed on the same scale. The dirt poor pay nothing, because you can't wring blood from a turnip. The filthy rich pay near zero, because they can bribe the various officials necessary to get away with tax evasion.
My overall tax burden (federal, state, local, sales taxes, real estate, everything) is near to 33% of my income. Sales taxes are the most variable item in the list, but 30% to 35% has held pretty true for all of my adult working life.
If every other American and American corporation, along with all foreign corporations operating in the US, paid the same, we could probably come pretty close to balancing the budget.
It's the corporations, even more than the individual rich Americans, who screw that all up.
If you make money, pay the damned taxes! THAT is a proper apportionment.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday July 30 2018, @02:02PM
We could solve a lot of budget woes simply by eliminating the maximum income that FICA (Social Security, Medicare) taxes are applied to. It's really strange that we have what is ostensibly an income tax where an engineer making $130K a year pays exactly the same total amount in that kind of tax as a hedge fund manager making $3 million a year.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.