CamelBak, Vista Outdoor Hit with Wage and Hour Class Action in California

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CamelBak Products, LLC and Vista Outdoor, Inc. find themselves staring down a proposed wage and hour class action lawsuit recently removed to California district court. The seven-count complaint alleges the companies have failed to pay proper minimum, straight-time and overtime wages stemming from rest and meal break improprieties.

According to the complaint, the plaintiff worked for the Los Angeles-based defendants as a picking and packing employee from roughly 1999 through January 2018. The woman alleges that from the beginning of her employment until December 2017, the defendants had a system of rounding workers’ time to the nearest quarter hour. Under this system, the suit says, the plaintiff would regularly clock in around 7:55 a.m. yet be paid only for work performed starting at 8 a.m.

The plaintiff goes on to allege CamelBak and Vista Outdoor failed to provide employees with timely, duty-free meal breaks and sometimes required proposed class members to work more than five consecutive hours in a day without a 30-minute “continuous and uninterrupted” meal period. To this claim, the plaintiff adds workers subject to such arrangements received no compensation “for meal periods that were not provided by the end of the fifth hour of work or tenth hour of work.” From the complaint:

“For example, throughout her employment, including from December 2017 to January 2018, [the defendants] required [the plaintiff] to work over six consecutive hours in a day without [the defendants] providing her a 30-minute, continuous and uninterrupted, duty-free meal period at least once or twice a month. During these instances, [the plaintiff] could not take a meal break because her supervisor … told [the plaintiff] to return to work.”

The suit goes on to chide the defendants over their alleged failure to have in place policies to monitor and verify whether workers were taking mandatory meal and rest breaks. With regard to rest breaks, the lawsuit claims CamelBak and Vista Outdoor regularly allowed employees to work in excess of four straight hours without authorizing or permitting timely and duty-free rest breaks of at least 10 continuous minutes.

Rounding out the case is the charge that the defendants willfully failed to timely remit to the plaintiff all wages owed at the conclusion of her employment.