A judge for the Supreme Court of the State of California has rejected an appeal by AB Trucking company of a previous ruling that will force them to pay just shy of $1 million in damages to some of its past and present employees.
According to the lawsuit, AB Trucking, which serves the port of Oakland, discouraged their drivers from taking any meal or rest breaks, telling them to eat while they waited in line to enter the port. Despite this however, they deducted an hour’s worth of pay every day for the “lunch break” their employees took, regardless of whether they actually did.
California state law requires companies to provide their employees with paid ten minute rest breaks every four hours and a paid 30 minute meal break every 5 hours.
Additionally, port trucking companies have been in the news a lot lately for misclassifying employees as independent contractors, but AB Trucking took it a step further and treated some of its employees as unpaid trainees and simply didn’t pay them.
The judge presiding over the case, Robert Freedman, ruled that AB trucking has wrongly classified their drivers and had deducted pay for breaks that their employees were discouraged from taking. Freedman awarded the 73 past and present drivers $964,000 in damages and ordered the carrier to pay an additional $500,000+ in attorney’s fees and court costs.
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Source: sfgate
When is the trucking company going to learn.