Well, perhaps it's not so recent, having been decided in January. Everything is relative. In Jimenez-Sanchez v. Dark Horse Express, Inc., 32 Cal.App.5th 224 (Jan. 16, 2019; pub. ord. Feb. 14, 2019), the Court of Appeal (Fifth Appellate District) reversed an order denying class certification of certain wage and hour claims, including a claim that the defendant failed to provide paid rest breaks to the plaintiff piece-rate truck drivers, in violation of Wage Order 9 as construed in Bluford v. Safeway Stores, Inc., 216 Cal.App.4th 864 (2013).
One curious aspect of this opinion is the Court's apparent assumption that Bluford applies prospectively only:
In sum, at least as to claims arising after the decision in Bluford, plaintiffs’ claims for separate compensation for rest breaks presented some common factual and legal issues that the trial court should have considered ....
Jimenez-Sanchez, 32 Cal.App.5th at 709 (emphasis added). Elsewhere in the opinion, the panel offered a similar comment about Gonzalez v. Downtown LA Motors, LP, 25 Cal.App.4th 36 (2013):
We note that the Gonzalez decision was issued in 2013 .... The proposed class period began in 2010. Plaintiffs assume the legal issue is a common issue, without discussing whether the law remained the same throughout the class period. Plaintiffs have not discussed the state of the law on this issue prior to Gonzalez.
Id. at 703.
The California Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized that new opinions construing civil statutes are given retroactive effect because they simply declare what the statutes have always required. (The exceptions to this principle are exceedingly narrow, such as when a new opinion overrules a settled prior holding of a court of last resort and retroactive application would be manifestly unjust.) In Bluford, the Court of Appeal construed Wage Order language dating back decades. Since 1952, Wage Order 9 has always said that "[a]uthorized rest period time shall be counted as hours worked" and that "all hours worked" shall be paid. Regardless of when Bluford was decided, Bluford's holding has been the law for more than sixty-five years; Bluford simply applied that law in the specific context of piece-rate compensation (a method of compensation that dates back to the very first Wage Order (adopted in 1916) and was permitted by Wage Order 9-52).
In the Bluford case itself (in which I served as co-counsel after the appeal was concluded), there was no question the appellate opinion applied to all of the defendant's violations preceding the opinion's publication. The class period began, not when Bluford was decided, but on October 1, 2000, the effective date when premium wages for rest break violations first became law. (Incidentally, after remand, the trial court in Bluford held that premium wages were recoverable for failing to provide paid rest breaks--a "legal question" that Jimenez-Sanchez says "may be common for all putative class members, at least for the time period after the decision in Bluford." 32 Cal.App.5th at 708.)
The retroactivity issue was obviously not briefed in Jimenez-Sanchez, and given settled Supreme Court law, I can certainly understand why the parties saw no need to address it. An order for further briefing on the topic would have been an excellent way for the Jimenez-Sanchez court to proceed. I observe that depublication requests and a petition for review are pending.
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