In its recent opinion in Huerta v. CSI Electrical Contractors, the California Supreme Court addressed three inquiries posed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit addressing “hours worked” within the context of the California Labor Code and several state wage orders:

• Is time spent on an employer’s premises in a personal vehicle and waiting to scan an identification badge, have a security guard peer into the vehicle, and then exit the security gate compensable as “hours worked”?

• Is time spent on the employer’s premises in a personal vehicle, driving between the security gate and the employee parking lots subject to certain rules from the employer “hours worked”?
• Is time spent on the employer’s premises, when workers are prohibited from leaving but not required to engage in employer-mandated activities, hours worked when it is designated as an unpaid meal period under a qualifying collective bargaining agreement?

Shannon Bettis Nakabayashi, a principal in Jackson Lewis’ San Francisco office, discusses the California Supreme Court’s answer to these questions in our California Workplace Law Blog,