U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco has approved Apple’s $30.5 million settlement. The settlement covers a class-action lawsuit from 2013 in which Apple was accused of short-changing 15,000 retail workers by not paying them for the time they spend in security checks after their shift.
The plaintiffs in Apple’s case alleged that retail workers often waited several minutes, sometimes longer, to have their bags checked before they could leave the stores where they worked.
In 2015, Alsup dismissed the case, claiming that workers were not under the company’s control during security checks because they did not have to bring personal items to work that needed to be checked.
A federal appeals court, however, asked the California Supreme Court to decide whether the time spent on post-shift screenings should be compensated under the law.
Finally, in 2020, the California Supreme Court used the case to rule that state law requires employees to be paid if they go through mandatory security checks.
In its ruling against Apple in 2020, the court said it was impractical to expect employees not to bring personal items to work.
The sources for this piece include an article in Reuters.
