New Statewide Minimum Wage and Salary Test. California raised its statewide minimum wage to $17.40 effective January 1, 2027, up 50 cents an hour. That also means that the new salary test for exempt employees increases, to $72,384 annually. Remember, many of you have workers in jurisdictions whose minimum wage already exceeds this figure, or…
Ensuring the Enforceability of our Arbitration Agreements
The good news is that the PAGA Reform we passed over two years ago now is starting to impact these cases and settlements. The bad news is, these attorneys have built an empire on these wage and hour collective actions, and they are not going away that easily. One of their key maneuvers…
Managing the Mindset of a Mobile Workforce
Most of my inspiration for these articles comes from issues raised by my own clients. This one was sparked by a client who called me, aghast to discover that one of her employees was looking at other job opportunities. “We can terminate her for this, right?” My client was certain that this display of disloyalty…
Employees Must be Paid Mileage for Work Related Driving
The last time I wrote about mileage reimbursement was March 2022. The war in Ukraine had just broken out, and employees were just starting to return to in office work. Gas prices were up, and people were back on the road. The IRS mileage reimbursement rate was 58.5 cents. And here we are in late…
Check Before You Hire
I want to start with my client’s story from this weekend, because it’s the impetus for revisiting this topic. They hired a manager and had paused her onboarding to check her references. Unfortunately, when they checked, they could not verify any of the work experience she had cited. Indeed, not only could they not verify…
Controlling Worker’s Compensation Claims and Costs – A Refresh
An informed discussion about controlling the costs of worker’s compensation insurance begs a bit of background about the workers’ compensation framework. This may be old news for some of you, but it bears repeating because the context here is everything. How Does Workers’ Compensation Insurance Work? The workers’ compensation system is a compromise. It is…
Employers’ Obligations Increase Along with the Temperature
I received the alert below from the Department of Industrial Relations, and it seemed a good time to address the issue of heat regulations for employers. This alert was for last week, but this coming week will be even hotter. California has several laws that address the obligations of employers for both indoor and…
Revisiting Regular Rate of Pay (RROP) – Again
Before you all tune out, just know – the issue of Regular Rate of Pay arises when you pay non-exempt employees ANY rate beyond just their base hourly rate. That includes extra compensation, such as bonuses, service charge income, shift differential, or differing rates of pay in the same workweek. THAT WILL INCLUDE ANY OF…
Managing Employees in an AI Driven World
As many of you may recall, I started off my last piece on this issue in November 2025 by asking ChatGPT to answer the question – how is AI impacting the workplace? I didn’t ask it that same question today, but I suspect it would give me a similar but slightly different answer. That’s because…
July 1 Minimum Wage Increases on the Horizon
As most California employers now know, California does not have just one minimum wage. Depending on your location and your industry, minimum wage can vary greatly in our lovely golden state. Some of these minimum wages increase in January, when the state minimum wage hikes. Others, like Los Angeles, Los Angeles County (unincorporated!), and other…