Opinion ID: 844210
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Scope of an Employer's Duty to Provide Rest Periods

Text: Preliminary to its assessment of the trial court's certification of a rest period subclass, the Court of Appeal addressed two threshold legal questions: the amount of rest time that must be authorized, and the timing of any rest periods. We consider these same two questions.
Brinker's rest period duties are defined solely by Wage Order No. 5, subdivision 12. To determine the rate at which rest time must be authorized, we begin, as always, with the text. (See Reynolds v. Bement, supra, 36 Cal.4th at p. 1086 [The best indicator of [the IWC's] intent is the language of the [wage order] provision itself.].) 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. The authorized rest period time shall be based on the total hours worked daily at the rate of ten (10) minutes net rest time per four (4) hours or major fraction thereof. However, a rest period need not be authorized for employees whose total daily work time is less than three and one-half (3½) hours. (17) The text of the wage order is dispositive; it defines clearly how much rest time must be authorized. Under Wage Order No. 5, subdivision 12(A)'s second sentence, employees receive 10 minutes for each four hours of work or major fraction thereof. Though not defined in the wage order, a major fraction long has been understoodlegally, mathematically, and linguisticallyto mean a fraction greater than one-half. [9] The term majority fraction was first introduced in 1947 and then amended to major fraction in 1952; [10] the contemporaneous historical evidence suggests the IWC in the 1940's understood the term in just such a sense. (See, e.g., IWC meeting mins. (June 14, 1943) p. 22 [interpreting `any fraction of fifteen minutes' to mean the majority fraction thereof, or eight minutes or more].) The Division of Labor Standards Enforcement (DLSE) has so interpreted the phrase as well, construing major fraction thereof as applied to a four-hour period to mean any amount of time in excess of two hoursi.e., any fraction greater than half. (Dept. Industrial Relations, DLSE Opn. Letter No. 1999.02.16 (Feb. 16, 1999) p. 1.) [11] (18) It follows that Wage Order No. 5, subdivision 12(A)'s second sentence defines the rest time that must be permitted as the number of hours worked divided by four, rounded down if the fractional part is half or less than half and up if it is more (a major fraction), times 10 minutes. Thus, under the initial calculation called for by this part of the wage order, an employee would receive no rest break time for shifts of two hours or less, 10 minutes for shifts lasting more than two hours up to six hours, 20 minutes for shifts lasting more than six hours up to 10 hours, and so on. Though under the basic calculation the right to 10 minutes' rest would accrue for any shift lasting more than two hours, the third sentence of Wage Order No. 5's rest period subdivision modifies this entitlement slightly. Under the third sentence, a rest period need not be authorized for employees whose total daily work time is less than three and one-half (3½) hours. (Wage Order No. 5, subd. 12(A).) Thus, employees working shifts lasting over two hours but under three and one-half hours, who otherwise would have been entitled to 10 minutes' rest, need not be permitted a rest period. The combined effect of the two pertinent sentences, giving full effect to each, is this: Employees are entitled to 10 minutes' rest for shifts from three and one-half to six hours in length, 20 minutes for shifts of more than six hours up to 10 hours, 30 minutes for shifts of more than 10 hours up to 14 hours, and so on. The Court of Appeal, however, construed the third sentence of the subdivision as supplying the definition of major fraction thereof, reasoning that otherwise the three and one-half hour proviso and the preceding language would be irreconcilable. In its view, employees are entitled to 10 minutes' rest for shifts of three and one-half hours or more, to 20 minutes' rest for shifts of seven and one-half hours or more, and so on. An employee working a seven-hour shift thus would be entitled to only 10 minutes' rest. This reading cannot be reconciled with either the wage order's text or its adoption history. First, the express language of the three and one-half hour proviso speaks only to the circumstance where an employee's  total daily work time is less than three and one-half (3½) hours (Wage Order No. 5, subd. 12(A), italics added); it does not speak to the circumstance where an employee's total daily work time is less than seven and one-half hours, or less than 11½ hours. [M]ajor fraction can be applied to, and must be defined for, each four-hour period, not just the first four hours of an employee's shift: How much time must be worked to earn a second 10 minutes, or a third? What does it mean to work four hours plus a major fraction of another four hours? The three and one-half hour proviso cannot answer those questions. Second, the Court of Appeal's interpretation disregards the use of the word However at the beginning of the three and one-half hour proviso, which signals that what follows is a deviation from or exception to the previous rule, not an amplification of it. Though the Court of Appeal perceived an inconsistency, there is nothing inconsistent in reading the three and one-half hour proviso as a specific exception to the general rule that working for a major fraction of four hours is sufficient to entitle one to rest time: to earn the first 10 minutes, one must be scheduled for a work shift of at least three and one-half hours, while to earn the next 10 minutes, one must be scheduled to work four hours plus a major fraction, to earn the next, eight hours plus a major fraction, and so on. The IWC's explanatory remarks at the time the three and one-half hour proviso was adopted reveal the proviso was intended as just such a limited exception: `The rest period provision was clarified to indicate that an employee working less than 3½ hours for the entire day would not need to have a rest period.' (IWC meeting mins. (May 16, 1952) p. 34.) The three and one-half hour proviso thus was not inserted as a definition of the phrase major fraction, but simply as a limit on the shift length that would warrant any break at all. Finally, the Court of Appeal attached great significance to a different 1952 change, the substitution in the wage order of major for majority, but the two terms are essentially synonymous when used as modifiers, and the change appears to have been the product of an idiomatic choice, rather than an intended semantic distinction. (See also IWC wage order No. 5-57, subd. 15(a) (Nov. 15, 1957) [amending toilet requirements to mandate one toilet for every twenty-five (25) female employees or major fraction thereof in lieu of . . . majority fraction thereof with no evident change in meaning].) Having resolved the amount of rest time an employer must authorize and permit, we turn to the question of when it must be afforded.
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.