Williams v. Securitas Security Services USA, Inc.

Background

Ashley Williams alleged that she worked as a security guard for Securitas from 2018 through December 2021. Her complaint included claims about sexual harassment, retaliation, and wrongful termination, along with six wage-and-hour claims under California law. The wage claims alleged failures to provide meal and rest breaks, timely pay wages, pay overtime, provide accurate wage statements, and comply with California’s Unfair Competition Law based on the wage violations.

Williams alleged that she regularly worked more than eight hours per day and forty hours per week without overtime pay, was denied legally compliant meal and rest breaks, and performed work after clocking out. Securitas removed the case from state court and moved to dismiss the six wage claims.

Collective-Bargaining Agreement and Preemption

Williams was a union member and covered by a collective-bargaining agreement, or CBA, that governed her employment. The CBA addressed wages, work hours, overtime, meal and rest periods, and grievance and arbitration procedures. It also stated that wage-and-hour disputes, including claims under several California Labor Code provisions, would be brought through the agreement’s grievance process.

The court held that the CBA preempted the meal-break claim because it satisfied the statutory requirements for replacing California’s ordinary meal-period rules. The court also held that the rest-break claim was preempted based on the CBA’s rest-break provisions and dispute procedure, noting that Williams did not specifically respond to that argument.

For overtime, the court held that the CBA satisfied California Labor Code section 514 by providing for wages, hours, working conditions, overtime premiums, and a regular wage exceeding 130 percent of California’s minimum wage. To the extent Williams sought an overtime system different from the CBA’s system, the CBA governed that right. The court distinguished claims based on work for which an employee received no pay at all, explaining that determining whether minimum wages were paid for hours worked would not require interpreting the CBA. The court nonetheless found Williams’s allegations too conclusory to state a plausible claim.

The court dismissed the timely-payment claim as preempted because the CBA established a different pay arrangement. It also held that the accurate-wage-statement and Unfair Competition Law claims were derivative of the preempted wage claims and therefore were preempted as well.

The court did not decide whether the CBA’s grievance-and-arbitration language independently barred Williams from seeking judicial relief on the wage claims. It concluded that the parties had not adequately addressed that issue in the briefing.

Failure to State a Claim

The court separately considered whether the complaint alleged enough facts to state a plausible claim. It held that Williams generally alleged that she regularly worked overtime without compensation and was denied breaks, but did not identify a specific workweek in which she worked more than forty hours without overtime pay or was paid less than the minimum wage. The allegation that Securitas contacted her after she clocked out did not, by itself, show that she actually performed compensable overtime work, although the court noted that she presumably could allege facts about the employer’s knowledge of such work.

The court concluded that the allegations were too general to plausibly plead the wage-and-hour claims. It dismissed claims one through four with leave to amend and dismissed claims five and six because they depended on those claims.

Disposition

The court granted the motion to dismiss claims one through six with leave to amend. It ordered Williams to file any amended complaint within four weeks and attach a blackline comparison with the current complaint. The order resolved the motion identified as ECF No. 5. The opinion does not state a disposition for the complaint’s separate harassment, retaliation, and wrongful-termination claims.