The Court of Appeal has applied a primary purpose test to the case of a store manager classified as exempt by her employer, and found that the employee was misclassfied. In Heyen v. Safeway (2013) ___ Cal.App.4th ___, the court was called upon to decide how to characterize time spent on nonexempt tasks when the manager is also simultaneously responsible for management and supervision.
Plaintiff/respondent Linda Heyen is a former assistant manager for defendant/appellant Safeway Inc. (Safeway). After Safeway terminated her employment, Heyen brought this action to recover unpaid overtime pay, contending Safeway should have classified her as a “nonexempt” employee because she regularly spent more than 50 percent of her work hours doing “nonexempt” tasks such as bagging groceries and stocking shelves. An advisory jury and the trial court agreed with Heyen and awarded her overtime pay of $26,184.60, plus interest.
Safeway appeals, contending that the trial court failed to properly account for hours Heyen spent simultaneously performing exempt and nonexempt tasks—i.e., “actively . . . manag[ing] the store while also concurrently performing some checking and bagging of customer grocery purchases.” Safeway urges that, consistent with federal law, the trial court should have classified as “exempt” all hours during which Heyen simultaneously performed exempt and nonexempt tasks. Because the court failed to do so, Safeway claims it prejudicially erred, requiring a reversal of the judgment.
We disagree with Safeway’s analysis as inconsistent with California law. Hence, we affirm the judgment for Heyen.
Essentially, the argument presented by employers in this sort of situation is to claim that while a manager might be bagging groceries, or sweeping floors or ringing up sales, they also are observing their subordinates, overseeing the general operations of the store and other tasks that fall upon exempt managers, therefore, the time spent sweeping floors should count as time spent on exempt tasks for the purpose of meeting the 50% time test required to prove that the manager is "primarily engaged in duties which meet the test of the exemption" from overtime pay.
In this case, the trial court instructed the jury as follows:
“If a party claims that an employee is engaged in concurrent performance of an exempt and non-exempt work, you must consider that time to be either an exempt or a non-exempt activity depending on the primary purpose for which the employee undertook the activity at that time. The nature of the activity can change from time to time.”
So time spent for each task, or each period of multitasking, had to be evaluated either as primarily exempt work, or primarily nonexempt work. If it was primarily nonexempt work, it was nonexempt work even if the manager was simultaneously making sure that nothing was happening that needed a manager's intervention at the time. Applying that standard, the managers were found to be nonexempt.
The opinion contains a very good discussion of the federal regulations on this subject, as well as a discussion of the employer's "reasonable expectations" defense that was found lacking in this particular case. You can download the entire opinion in Heyen v. Safeway here in PDF or Word.
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