Opinion ID: 844210
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Rest period timing

Text: Hohnbaum asserts employers have a legal duty to permit their employees a rest period before any meal period. Construing the plain language of the operative wage order, we find no such requirement and agree with the Court of Appeal, which likewise rejected this contention. (19) Wage Order No. 5, subdivision 12(A) provides in relevant part: Every employer shall authorize and permit all employees to take rest periods, which insofar as practicable shall be in the middle of each work period. Neither this part of the wage order nor subdivision 11, governing meal periods, speaks to the sequence of meal and rest breaks. The only constraint on timing is that rest breaks must fall in the middle of work periods insofar as practicable. Employers are thus subject to a duty to make a good faith effort to authorize and permit rest breaks in the middle of each work period, but may deviate from that preferred course where practical considerations render it infeasible. At the certification stage, we have no occasion to decide, and express no opinion on, what considerations might be legally sufficient to justify such a departure. The difficulty with Hohnbaum's argument that we should read into the wage order an absolute obligation to permit a rest period before a meal period can be illustrated by considering the case of an employee working a six-hour shift. Such an employee is entitled (in the absence of mutual waiver) to a meal period (Wage Order No. 5, subd. 11(A)) and, as discussed above, to a single rest period. Either the rest period must fall before the meal period or it must fall after. Neither text nor logic dictates an order for these, nor does anything in the policies underlying the wage and hour laws [12] compel the conclusion that a rest break at the two-hour mark and a meal break at the four-hour mark of such a shift is lawful, while the reverse, a meal break at the two-hour mark and a rest break at the four-hour mark, is per se illegal. (20) Hohnbaum seeks to overcome the lack of textual support for his position by offering a DLSE opinion letter interpreting the identical language in a different wage order. (Dept. Industrial Relations, DLSE Opn. Letter No. 2001.09.17 (Sept. 17, 2001) [interpreting IWC wage order No. 16-2001 (Cal. Code Regs., tit. 8, § 11160)].) Responding to a hypothetical about an employer who affords employees a meal break at the five-hour mark of an eight-hour shift, the DLSE opined that absent truly unusual circumstances, placing both rest breaks before the meal break, and none after, would not comport with the wage order requirement that rest breaks `insofar as practicable, shall be in the middle of each work period.' (DLSE Opn. Letter No. 2001.09.17, supra, at p. 4.) We have no reason to disagree with the DLSE's view regarding the scenario it considered, but that view does not establish universally the proposition that an employee's first rest break must always come sometime before his or her first meal break. Rather, in the context of an eight-hour shift, [a]s a general matter, one rest break should fall on either side of the meal break. ( Ibid. ) Shorter or longer shifts and other factors that render such scheduling impracticable may alter this general rule.