Cirrincione v. American Scissor Lift, Inc., 73 Cal. App. 5th 619 (2022)

Jason Cirrincione filed a putative class action lawsuit against his former employer for various wage and hour violations, including failure to pay overtime and minimum wages, meal and rest breaks, waiting time penalties, Cal. Labor Code § 2802, etc. These claims were predicated on the employer’s policy and/or practice of rounding the work time of its employee, which allegedly resulted in the systematic underpayment of wages. The trial court denied Cirrincione’s motion to certify seven subclasses of employees, holding that certification was not warranted because plaintiff had failed to establish that common questions of fact or law would predominate over individual questions. The Court of Appeal affirmed, holding that “an employer in California is entitled to round its employees’ work time if the rounding is done in a ‘fair and neutral’ manner that does not result, over a period in time, in the failure to properly compensate employees for all the time they have actually worked.” The Court further held that “simply alleging the existence of a uniform policy or practice (or unlawful lack of a policy) is not enough to establish predominance of common questions required for class certification.”