Misclassification and Mismanagement under California Labor Law

Visilia, CA "In management you manage people but in this company it was all about manual labor," says Edward, who believes he was misclassified as exempt, and that his employer was violating the California labor law.

Hobby Lobby, the home décor chain with about 400 stores nationwide, hired Edward as a co-manager (not assistant manager). He was promised a five-day workweek, about 55 hours per week and a salary for $900 per week. Instead, Edward says that for the first six months, he worked six days per week including Sundays and 12 hours per day - in other words, 70 hours per week. Wait, it gets worse…

"Then they transferred me to Las Vegas where I worked from 6:30 am 'til 7:00 pm or even 8:30 pm when we closed, 6 days a week," says Edward. "They send out this locked schedule to co-managers from the Hobby Lobby corporate office but you never work those hours. All I did was labor intensive work - I unloaded trucks and loaded boxes; I did all the stocking and merchandising and learned a small amount of management - probably about 10 percent."

(According to the California labor code, assistant store managers working on salary over 40 hours a week and who perform non-exempt duties such as those described by Edward could be entitled to overtime pay.)

Still, in Nevada, Edward was asked if he would go back to California for seven weeks to help open a new Hobby Lobby store. “I would be helping the store manager with hiring and managerial tasks so I accepted the job,” Edward explains. “Instead, I unloaded trucks, and did 80 percent of the labor, 12 hours per day, 6 days per week. (The manager told me that he couldn’t work more than 50 percent of manual labor duties; instead he had to delegate the labor to me, otherwise he would be owed overtime!)

“At the end of the seventh week, they hired two co-managers to replace me but they didn’t call them co-managers. In the state of California you have to call them another name because if you work more than 40 hours per week, you have to be paid time and a half. This way, the company didn’t have to pay salary or overtime.

“Two employees with an hourly wage and no overtime was a better deal for the company than having me on salary without getting paid overtime, because the company knew that, according to California labor law, they would have had to pay me overtime.

“When I got back to Las Vegas I asked why I wasn’t paid overtime in California: I was supposed to be paid hourly because I was doing manual labor. My boss told me to send the head office a letter stating how much money in overtime they owed me, which I did. I figured they owed me $4,000. But they replied that they owed me nothing because I was exempt and I was hired through Nevada; apparently working in California didn’t count.

"I find this very hard to believe and I'm sure an attorney will confirm that Hobby Lobby has violated another California labor law.

“Interestingly, I worked in the State of California about 10 years ago as an assistant manager for a grocery store called ‘Smart and Final.’ A cass action was filed against them and the company paid overtime compensation owed to assistant managers. I received a check in the mail about five years ago - a very pleasant surprise - for more than $5,000.”

Edward was recently terminated from Hobby Lobby. According to the online legal resource tool law29.com, a nationwide investigation is underway regarding the company's alleged violations of federal law for failure to pay its Co-Managers overtime pay.

“If it was a good company and they stood behind me, I would have stayed longer,” says Edward, “but since they have lied and terminated me, I am in the process of finding an attorney who will help me get compensated for what is owed to me.”