Are you a California employer who is searching for an experienced, proven wage and hour employer defense attorney in San Diego or Southern California?  What are the risks of employee-related litigation involving wage and hour violations?  How does an action under the California Private Attorneys General Act or PAGA affect this equation?

3 key Elements of Wage and Hour Employer Defense in San Diego:

• Immediate action – a call to your Watkins Firm employer defense attorney – can help to significantly reduce the risk you face, if not mitigate the situation altogether.
• Wage and hour disputes and lawsuits represent a substantial legal and financial risk to California and San Diego employers.
• Wage and hour cases can quickly become a PAGA class action lawsuit, growing from a $20,000 to $30,000 risk to a $200,000 to $300,000 in a matter of 30 days.  There are steps you can take right now to prevent this.

What are the Risks of a Wage and Hour Violation?

One of the primary risks associated a wage and hour violation in California right now is the financial exposure for a variety of “damages.”  This includes, but is not limited to compensation for unpaid overtime, hours of work off the clock, skipping or shortening meal and rest breaks, tip violations, unpaid bonuses or commissions, or the failure to pay a minimum wage.  Here in California, the failure to pay minimum wage exposes the employer to double the damages.  Underpaying a departing employee, or the failure to pay final wages within 30 days invokes substantial additional penalties, and all wage and hour violations expose the employer to civil penalties (money) for each employee and each payroll period.  The monetary risks to an employer add up quickly.

In addition, many employers in California face the risk of a Private Attorneys General Act or PAGA class action.  The Private Attorneys General Act in California allows the employee to step into the shoes of the Attorney General with significant powers to investigate records and recruit other employees to join in a class action.  There are immediate steps which can be taken to fight off these allegations and minimize the impact of employee-related litigation. These cases involve not only substantial attorneys fees, but provide financial incentives to current and former employees, who share in the civil penalties generated for the state.  Again, penalties quickly compound exponentially based upon several pay periods and multiple employees.  In essence, a California employer faces the genuine risk of “stacked” or “overlap” penalties based on fines for separate codes within the law, but based upon a single act or omission.  These risks combined with assertions of retaliation, disciplinary violations, sexual harassment and discrimination can open the door to substantial employee-related litigation and the genuine risk of a PAGA action.

In addition, California and San Diego employers face actions by the California Labor Commissioner such as payroll compliance audits and investigations and/or Berman Hearings.  The California Department of Industrial Relations will soon come through your door to pile on with expensive citations and heavy fines for willful or repetitive violations.  In some cases, willful acts of an employer can actually open the door to criminal prosecution.

The Impact of the Private Attorneys General Act or PAGA

Your experienced wage and hour employer defense attorney in San Diego at the Watkins Firm can help you to take steps to immediately begin to mitigate the damages, or to remediate the situation quickly and efficiently.  We are often able to help our clients to simply pay the initial amounts owed, and/or correct incorrect paystubs or wage records.  A single, prompt phone call to the Watkins Firm at (858) 535-1511 for a free consultation can put a stop to any potential risk, while reducing or eliminating risks associated with PAGA actions.

Pro-tip: “California has earned a reputation as, hands down, the hardest state in which to be an employer. It’s earned. It really is. The state of California has hired or licensed a whole bunch of lawyers out there to be bounty hunters, and instead of funding any regulation and enforcement, they just said, we can say whatever we want. And they’ll be a lawyer out there who want to get attorney’s fees out of an employer and be a bounty hunter to try to catch you at the tiniest mistakes and make you pay dearly for it.

What’s the best word of caution? Pay attention and have a good lawyer! You need an attorney who stays up to speed and takes those little technical matters seriously, because it doesn’t cost much to be in compliance. It really doesn’t, but it costs so much to get caught. Usually you don’t get caught for a few months and before you know it, you could literally lose hundreds of thousands of dollars for an accounting error or the way you put your paychecks out or your refusal or failure to put up a little sign in your break room. All those little things. There’s some lawyer out there, Mr. Bounty Hunter, looking for you to try to collect five, 10, $15,000 in fees for tiny mistakes.

A good defense starts with a good offense!  Employment contracts, human resource manuals, employee handbooks, rules and regulations, training, and staying up to speed on the ever-changing laws in California.

And if we find a problem, we remediate it.  Immediately. If you know ahead of time and have a good experienced lawyer that’s not just ready to milk you, because that’s what the wrong lawyer will do, they won’t propose a solution. They’ll just propose fight, fight. But sometimes we have our employer clients come in. and we say, no, no, no, don’t pay us all this money. Pay the extra $3,000 in wages. Send out amended pay stubs before you even have to answer the complaint. And guess what? All of the causes of action that have attorney’s fees in them are gone. Nobody wants to sue you anymore because of that. So yeah, quick action gives your lawyer the right to do things that just destroy a case in the beginning.

When you do defense work, you want to get rid of cases as soon as possible. Nobody in business makes money just staying in litigation. The most important piece of advice you I often give an employer is the second that you become aware of any potential employee related dispute, Pick up the phone and call us at the Watkins Firm, We can tell you ‘that mole isn’t cancer, or, that sounds like a genuine problem. Let’s take action! Call us, and you describe what’s going on with a certain troubled employee. And we can tell you like skin cancer, oh, that fact scenario doesn’t really fit something that I would go ahead and fight with them or we can say, oh, this one looks bad because of the things they’re complaining about or just the general facts. I would handle it this way. And so you can turn a $20,000 or $30,000 lawsuit situation into empowerment where you can stand your ground or maybe you make some concessions because you got some advice from your lawyer. You need to know when you got to worry about it and when you don’t.” – Dan Watkins, Founding Partner

Contact an Experienced Wage and Hour Employer Defense Attorney in San Diego

The most important thing to learn on the topic of employer defense is to take immediate action at the first sign of any dispute or inquiry from a state or federal agency or plaintiff’s attorney. You need to contact an experienced wage and hour employer defense attorney in San Diego at the Watkins Firm.  Put our 40+ years of experience and proven results to work on your side of the equation.  We aggressively defend California employers, and we want to help you.

We invite you to review our podcast Episode 18 – Private Attorneys General Act or PAGA as well as the strong recommendations of our clients and contact the Watkins Firm or call 858-535-1511 for a complimentary consultation today. You must take immediate action to mitigate associated circumstances and remediate the potential damages while closing the door on six or seven figure awards of attorneys fees.  The experienced wage and hour employer defense attorneys at the Watkins Firm can and will help.