Surely IBM will appeal this ruling.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/ibm-employee-costs-18195834.php
After Gov. Gavin Newsom issued his stay-at-home order in March 2020, at the outset of the pandemic, some companies said they wouldn’t compensate employees for work expenses at home because they were just following the state’s orders.
But on Tuesday, in a case involving several thousand IBM employees in San Francisco, a state appeals court said the companies would have to pay.
California law protects workers “from bearing the costs of business expenses that are incurred by workers doing their jobs in service of an employer,” the First District Court of Appeal said in a 3-0 ruling. Even if the business in this case was simply obeying Newsom’s edict to shut its offices and tell employees to work from home, the court said, “the work performed was for the benefit of IBM.”
That doesn’t mean the employees will be reimbursed dollar-for-dollar for the costs of home computer service, headsets and other work-related equipment that would normally be provided at the office, said Craig Ackermann, lawyer for an IBM employee who filed the class action suit in December 2021.
Because the company, like most large businesses, required workers to agree to take workplace disputes to individual arbitration rather than suing in court, Ackermann said they would instead seek penalties in the name of the state for violations of labor laws. California’s Private Attorneys General Act, or PAGA, allows employees to collect 25% of those penalties, with the rest going to the state.
For the thousands of IBM workers in this case, Ackermann said, the penalties could be as much as $100 every two weeks — $25 to the workers, $75 to the state — for about 15 months of working at home. He said his law firm has settled about 25 cases with other companies that required employees to pay their own expenses, and many others can be sued under Tuesday’s ruling.
“For the companies that closed their offices and paid their workers nothing, they are now on notice that their conduct was illegal,” Ackermann said.
A lawyer for IBM did not respond to a request for comment. The company could appeal to the state Supreme Court.
IBM, the multinational technology company founded in 1911, has an office in San Francisco’s Financial District at 425 Market St.
IBM’s refusal to reimburse employees for work expenses they incurred at home was upheld in March 2022 by Superior Court Judge Anne-Christine Massullo. She said the workers could not show that the company was the “independent, direct cause” of their additional expenses, because “IBM was acting in response to government orders.”
But the appeals court said the issue was not why the company had ordered its employees to work from home, but whether their additional expenses were the result of their employer’s orders.
“The work-from-home expenses were inherent to IBM’s business,” Justice Mark Simons wrote, and state law “allocates the risk of unexpected expenses to the employer.”