MillerCoors Hit with Wage and Hour Lawsuit in California

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A lawsuit removed to California federal court alleges MillerCoors LLC employs a consistent policy of failing to pay proper wages, including those due upon separation of employment, and of failing to provide appropriate meal and rest periods and business expense reimbursements.

The plaintiff, who worked at the defendant’s Irwindale brewery, alleges in the 65-page suit that MillerCoors required certain employees to work off the clock and, to the workers’ detriment, engaged in rounding work hours to the nearest quarter- or half-hour. According to the suit, the defendant’s off-the-clock work demands stemmed from “difficult to attain production requirements and demands” placed on workers by managers.

MillerCoors, the case says, automatically deducted a 30-minute meal break from employees’ wages despite the fact that provided meals were “shortened or otherwise interrupted or provided untimely after five hours of shift work.” The suit claims MillerCoors failed to maintain records of meal period times in part because employees were required to swipe ID badges for shift start and end times yet were not required to do so for meal breaks.

The case goes on to allege that the plaintiff and similarly situated employees were systematically underpaid due to both the defendant’s practice of rounding down their work hours and its failure to properly calculate shift differentials owed to those who worked the second or third shift. The plaintiff, moreover, claims MillerCoors failed to factor shift differential pay into workers’ regular hourly rates for the purposes of calculating time-and-a-half and double overtime pay.