The Supreme Court of California has ruled that three years is the statute of limitations for employees to recover the remedy for an employer's failure to provide mandatory meal breaks or rest breaks in the state.
A jury in a Pennsylvania court determined Friday that Wal-Mart should pay workers at least $78.5 million for neglecting to pay its employees for extra hours they worked and for requiring them to work during rest breaks.
A jury has awarded $172 million in damages, including $115 million in punitive damages, to Wal-Mart employees who accused the giant retailer of violating California law covering meal breaks, the New York Times reports.
A jury this week heard lawyers representing about 116,000 former and current Wal-Mart employees in California accuse the retailer of systematically and illegally denying workers lunch breaks.
Los Robles Hospital & Medical Center in Thousand Oaks, California, has
agreed to pay $4.75 million to settle a lawsuit accusing the hospital of violating
the state's wage and hour law, the Los Angeles Times reports.
The California Division of Labor Standards Enforcement (DLSE), a division of
the Department of Industrial Relations (DIR), has withdrawn emergency regulations
governing meal and rest periods. The division
says it now intends to follow the normal rulemaking process on new rules and will hold a series of public hearings on the new proposed regulations.
An internal audit at Wal-Mart of 25,000 employee records found thousands of
possible violations of federal and state labor rules, but the company is calling
the in-house audit meaningless and the audit's methodology flawed, the New York
Times reports.
