Opinion ID: 2630272
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: How the IWC Has Defined the Employment Relationship.

Text: The IWC's first wage order, adopted in 1916, contained no separate definition of the term employ, but various substantive provisions imposing duties on employers began with language like that the IWC still uses today in all of its industry and occupation wage orders to define the term. For example: No person, firm or corporation shall employ or suffer or permit any woman or minor to work in the fruit and vegetable canning industry in any occupation at time rates less than the following . . . . (IWC former wage order No. 1, § 2, italics added; see, e.g., Wage Order No. 14, Cal. Code Regs., tit. 8, § 11140, subd. 2(C) [`Employ' means to engage, suffer, or permit to work  (italics added)].) The chosen language was especially apt in an order intended to regulate the employment of women and minors because it was already in use throughout the country in statutes regulating and prohibiting child labor (and occasionally that of women), [26] having been recommended for that purpose in several model child labor laws published between 1904 and 1912 (see Rutherford Food Corp. v. McComb (1947) 331 U.S. 722, 728, fn. 7 [91 L.Ed. 1772, 67 S.Ct. 1473]). The language had been interpreted to impose criminal liability for employing children, or civil liability for their industrial injuries, even when no common law employment relationship existed between the minor and the defendant, based on the defendant's failure to exercise reasonable care to prevent child labor from occurring. Not requiring a common law master and servant relationship, the widely used employ, suffer or permit standard reached irregular working arrangements the proprietor of a business might otherwise disavow with impunity. Courts applying such statutes before 1916 had imposed liability, for example, on a manufacturer for industrial injuries suffered by a boy hired by his father to oil machinery ( Curtis & Gartside Co. v. Pigg, supra, 134 P. 1125, 1127), and on a mining company for injuries to a boy paid by coal miners to carry water ( Purtell v. Philadelphia & Reading Coal & Iron Co., supra, 99 N.E. 899, 900-901). Results such as these, while foreign to the common law, were generally understood as appropriate under child labor statutes that included the employ, suffer or permit standard. As one state supreme court explained, [i]f the statute went no farther than to prohibit employment, then it could be easily evaded by the claim that the child was not employed to do the work which caused the injury, but that he did it of his own choice and at his own risk; and if it prohibited only the employment and permitting a child to do such things, then it might still be evaded by the claim that he was not employed to do such work, nor was permission given him to do so. But the statute goes farther, and makes use of a term even stronger than the term `permitted.' It says that he shall be neither employed, permitted, nor suffered to engage in certain works. ( Curtis & Gartside Co. v. Pigg, supra, 134 P. 1125, 1129.) The standard thus meant that the employer shall not employ by contract, nor shall he permit by acquiescence, nor suffer by a failure to hinder. ( Ibid. ) Similarly, another state supreme court rejected the employer's argument that the standard could only apply when the relation of master and servant actually exists. ( Purtell v. Philadelphia & Reading Coal & Iron Co., supra, 99 N.E. 899, 902.) To put [such a] construction on this statute . . . would leave the words `permitted or suffered to work' practically without meaning. It is the child's working that is forbidden by the statute, and not his hiring, and, while the statute does not require employers to police their premises in order to prevent chance violations of the act, they owe the duty of using reasonable care to see that boys under the forbidden age are not suffered or permitted to work there contrary to the statute. ( Ibid. ) The IWC's separate definition of employer (i.e., a person who employs or exercises control over the wages, hours, or working conditions of any person) [27] is only relatively recent, having first appeared in a 1947 order regulating the manufacturing industry. [28] The same language appears today in all 16 of the IWC's industry and occupation orders. Beginning with the word employs, the definition logically incorporates the separate definition of employ (i.e., to engage, suffer, or permit to work) as one alternative. The remainder of the definitionexercises control over . . . wages, hours, or working conditionshas no clearly identified, precisely literal statutory or common law antecedent. About this language, however, one may safely make three observations: (5) First, the scope of the IWC's delegated authority is, and has always been, over wages, hours and working conditions. (§§ 1173, 1178.5; see Stats. 1913, ch. 324, §§ 3, 5 & 6, pp. 633-635.) For the IWC to adopt a definition of employer that brings within its regulatory jurisdiction an entity that controls any one of these aspects of the employment relationship makes eminently good sense. Second, phrased as it is in the alternative (i.e., wages, hours, or working conditions), [29] the language of the IWC's employer definition has the obvious utility of reaching situations in which multiple entities control different aspects of the employment relationship, as when one entity, which hires and pays workers, places them with other entities that supervise the work. Consistently with this observation, the IWC has explained its decision to include the language in one modern wage order as specifically intended to include both temporary employment agencies and employers who contract with such agencies to obtain employees within the definition of `employer'. [30] Third, and finally, the IWC's employer definition belongs to a set of revisions intended to distinguish state wage law from its federal analogue, the FLSA. We touched upon this point in Morillion v. Royal Packing Co., supra, 22 Cal.4th 575. In 1947, Congress limited the FLSA by enacting the Portal-to-Portal Act of 1947 (29 U.S.C. § 252 et seq.), which relieved employers of the obligation to compensate employees for time spent travelling to the worksite, even in an employer's vehicle, and for time spent in activities preliminary to or postliminary to work ( id., § 254(a)(2)). In response, the IWC, exercising its authority to provide employees with greater protection than federal law affords ( Morillion v. Royal Packing Co., supra, at p. 592; see also Ramirez v. Yosemite Water Co. (1999) 20 Cal.4th 785, 795 [85 Cal.Rptr.2d 844, 978 P.2d 2]), revised its wage orders from 1947 forward to define the term hours worked as meaning the time during which an employee is subject to the control of an employer, . . . includ[ing] all the time the employee is suffered or permitted to work, whether or not required to do so. [31] At the same time, the IWC defined employer as meaning any person . . . who directly or indirectly, or through an agent or any other person, employs or exercises control over the wages, hours, or working conditions of [an employee]. [32] Noting this history, defendant Combs argues the IWC's 1947 changes were intended solely to expand the definition of hours worked and not also to affect the definition of employer. This is plainly wrong, as the IWC could have redefined hours worked without also redefining employer. One did not logically compel the other.