Law Center Search Results

On September 29th the NAM submitted an amicus letter to the Supreme Court of California supporting Schwan’s Home Service’s Petition for Review in the case of Colin Cochran v. Schwan’s Home Service. The case asks if an employee is owed reimbursement for a personal item used for work purposes even if the employee incurred no additional costs. California Labor Code Section 2802 requires that employers reimburse employees “for all necessary expenditures or losses incurred by the employee in direct consequence of the discharge of his or her duties.” The trial court ruled that calculating compensation for use of personal item at no cost would be too hard to calculate. However, the Court of Appeals (CoA) held that “The answer is that reimbursement is always required.” Nothing in the language of the decision limits the analysis to cell phones, and thus employees could be owed compensation for any number of mundane personal items utilized in a work context, even if the employee suffered no loss or expenditure. We argued that this ruling is so broad as to be completely unworkable, as well as completely unreasonable. Additionally, the Private Attorney General Act allows for civil fines to be levied against an employer for any violation of the Labor Code, thus compounding innocent failures to reimburse into disproportionate and frivolous fines. Thus, the NAM argued that the Supreme Court of California should take the decision up for review.