Conley

Respondent Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) classifies some of its employees as exempt from the federal and California laws requiring overtime pay. Appellants are PG&E employees who dispute PG&E’s classification of them as exempt. Appellants seek to pursue claims for unpaid overtime on behalf of several classes of PG&E employees who they assert have been improperly treated as exempt: a salary basis class, consisting of all PG&E employees who have been classified as exempt, and various job duties classes, each consisting of employees who hold jobs in specific categories. The trial court denied appellants’ motion for class certification in its entirety, and this appeal ensued.

As to the proposed salary basis class, appellants allege that PG&E’s policy of charging its exempt employees’ vacation leave banks for partial-day absences from work renders all of those employees nonexempt as a matter of California law. Because the trial court rejected this argument, it concluded that the class members did not share a plausible cause of action, and accordingly ruled that certification of the proposed class would be inappropriate.

Class certification normally should not be…