The Court of Appeal for the Fourth District followed up on its earlier unpublished opinion in Brinker v. Superior Court (Hohnbaum) with a new (temporarily at least) published opinion.

This is a huge victory for employers on two counts.  First, employers no longer have to frog march their employees out to meal periods.  Second, class certification is not appropriate where the individual issue of unlawful prevention of taking a meal period prevails over the class-wide question.

The first part, of course, reverses the policy that employers had to ensure that employees took a meal period in response to concerns that passive allowance as opposed to active insistence would lead to “wink-wink nod-nod” abuses inconsistent with written policies.

The other side of the equation has to do with the proliferation of wage and hour class actions based on essentially unprovable facts leading to huge settlements.  With the legislature and executive in the hands of different parties, the Courts will be taking the lead on these issues for now, since no bill addressing this is likely to clear.  So, apparently, this Court of Appeal decided to put the brakes on both the class actions and the meal period cases.

But, don’t change that handbook yet.

This case was already headed to the Supremes before the Court of Appeal yanked it back.  No doubt it will be back there, and we’ll be on Brinker watch yet again.  I supposed tehcnically, until this case is certified for review, you don’t have to do anything other than make meal periods available.  But who knows how long that would be.

I would simply not change anything until this is resolved.