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PacSun Sued For Alleged Wage Theft
On-call scheduling is a practice in retail when the sales staff is required to call store management in order to get a green light to come to work.
Prominent mall retailer Pacific Sunwear of California Inc. was sued in Los Angeles Superior Court by a former employee for this practice, which the plaintiff, Shayna Broadstone, contends resulted in lost wages and haywire scheduling.
Her attorneys, from the Los Angeles firm McNicholas & McNicholas LLP, filed a class-action suit against the Anaheim, Calif.–headquartered retailer on Sept. 16, said Patrick McNicholas, a partner in the firm and an attorney for the plaintiff.
“It is generically described as wage theft,” McNicholas said of the practice of on-call scheduling. “It is unfair.”
Craig Gosselin, general counsel for PacSun, said that the retailer had not been served with the complaint and would not comment on the matter.
The 16-page complaint states that PacSun violated California’s reporting time pay requirement, Wage Order 7-2001. It states that each workday that an employee is required to report to work but is not put to work after reporting, the employee will be paid for half of the day’s scheduled work.
The complaint alleges that Broadstone was not paid for the half time mandated by state law when she worked on-call hours at the PacSun store at the Glendale Galleria retail center in Glendale, Calif., from August to December 2011.
The complaint states that during her tenure at the store, Broadstone was frequently scheduled to work on-call shifts during days when store management scheduled her to work. She also had to call in on days when she was not scheduled to work. She typically had to call management an hour before her shift in order to confirm if she was needed in the store. “In reality, these on-call shifts are no different than regular shifts,” the complaint stated. “Defendants have misclassified them in order to avoid paying reporting time in accordance with applicable law.”
McNicholas & McNicholas has recently filed a suit against Gap Inc. for alleged violations of reporting time, McNicholas said.
