In Rodriguez v. E.M.E., Inc., the Court of Appeal considered an employer’s deviation from the “preferred” schedule of meal and rest breaks enumerated in section 12(A) of Wage Order 1-2001. For a daily shift of at least eight hours, employers must provide their employees with a thirty-minute meal break and two separate ten-minute rest breaks, at minimum. Courts have interpreted the language of the relevant section to require that each rest break should occur in the middle of each work period occurring before and after the meal break “insofar as practicable.”

Here, the Court interpreted the “insofar as practicable” language to permit a departure from the “preferred” schedule only when the departure will not unduly affect employee welfare, and is tailored to alleviate a material burden that would be imposed on the employer by implementing the preferred schedule. The Court declared that summary judgment should not have been granted to the employer because there remained triable issues of fact whether the employer’s policy of granting employees a combined twenty-minute rest break prior to their meal break is a permissible departure from the “preferred” schedule of breaks.

It is important to note that the Court did not hold that the Wage Order categorically bars combined rest breaks such as the one at issue; rather, the validity of such a policy needed to be determined on remand. The takeaway from this case is that the Wage Order sets the standard for meal and rest breaks and that employers bear a heavy burden if they wish to deviate from the “preferred” schedule.

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