Litigating California Wage & Hour and Labor Code Class Actions

not be disturbed on appeal. 364 The court also suggested that the reverse would be true, in
that a trial court’s order denying certification was entitled to similar deference: “We need not
conclude that plaintiffs’ evidence is compelling, or even that the trial court would have
abused its discretion if it had credited defendant’s evidence instead.” 365 Accordingly, the
same types of arguments that the defendant in Sav-On raised—that individualized issues
will predominate over common ones—still have potential to persuade a trial court to deny
certification; the trial court simply has the discretion to accept or reject the argument based
on its assessment of the facts before it.
While the California Supreme Court’s decision does not mandate certification in
misclassification cases, the court specifically identified several issues that are commonly
present in many manager misclassification cases that the court indicated could be
established through collective proof:
whether, as the plaintiff argued, the defendant had a deliberate policy to misclassify
non-exempt employees as exempt;
whether the defendant implicitly conceded all the employees were non-exempt
when it reclassified all the employees at issue as non-exempt in 1999;
whether any given task within the limited universe of tasks that managers
performed qualifies as exempt or non-exempt; and
whether a manager following the defendant’s reasonable expectation for
performing the job would spend the majority of the work time on exempt duties. 366
The court held that a trial court could rationally conclude that those common issues
predominated over the individualized issues concerning how individual managers spent
their time. Dismissing concerns that these cases could prove unmanageable, the court
further noted that the trial court had broad discretion as to how to handle individualized
issues once the class issues were resolved. The court said little more about those
proceedings other than to encourage trial courts to be “procedurally innovative” in
fashioning procedures to resolve remaining individualized issues efficiently. 367
364
365
366
367
Id. at 331; but see Aguiar v. Cintas Corp. No. 2, 144 Cal. App. 4th 121 (2006) (reversing court’s decision to deny
certification because the court did not consider the use of subclasses, but affirmatively ruling that certification was
required rather than remanding with instructions for trial court to exercise its discretion using proper standard).
Id.
Id. at 327.
Id. at 339.
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