Pham v Wood Tech, Inc.

Plaintiff brought a putative class action on behalf of hourly employees at Wood Tech, Inc. in Oakland, California. The lawsuit alleges the following:

• Wood Tech did not provide legally required meals and rest breaks. Specifically, Wood Tech’s official work schedule for employees working an 8-hour shift consisted of one rest break of 20 minutes that started after three hours of work; a second scheduled break that served as lunch break, but that was scheduled well past the legally mandated five-hour mark; and no additional rest break in the afternoon.
• Wood Tech did not keep any records of the start and end times of meal breaks, in violation of recordkeeping regulations. 
• Wood Tech auto-deducted 30 minutes from each shift without any time records to account for the meal-break-time deductions.
• Wood Tech did not pay employees fully for their work time, especially overtime. 
• In addition, for each scheduled break, Wood Tech would ring a warning bell before the end of the break to tell employees to start walking back to their workstations, so that the employees could actively restart their manufacturing tasks promptly. This effectively cut short the scheduled breaks.