Same pizza, different toppings.
Less than two months after a judge finalized a $1.3 million settlement paid by California Pizza Kitchen Inc. to its former restaurant employees, an accountant for the Los Angeles-based chain has filed a proposed class action in Los Angeles Superior Court, alleging similar wage claims.
Latonya Lindsey, a “non-certified accountant” who receives a salary at the company, claims she works 10 to 12 hours a day without overtime to meet “unrealistic deadlines” that force her to go “without rest periods and/or meal periods,” according to the suit, which does not specify how much she is seeking in damages. Lindsey is suing on behalf of all non-certified accountants who worked for California Pizza Kitchen in the past four years.
The litigation comes after a judge in Orange County Superior Court approved the $1.3 million settlement in a separate class action suit filed by the chain’s former food servers, bus staff, runners, bartenders and other restaurant employees who alleged they were denied rest and meal periods.
In that case, “we believe that all of our employees were provided with the opportunity to take all required meal and rest breaks,” the company said in its Securities and Exchange Commission filing. However, the filing added, “if the plaintiff were able to achieve class certification and prevail on the merits of the case, we could potentially be liable for significant amounts.”
In the more recent case, California Pizza Kitchen declined to comment until its executives had a chance to review the suit, said restaurant spokeswoman Erin Murphy.
Douglas Linde, a lawyer for Lindsey, said his client left California Pizza Kitchen’s corporate headquarters in May.
Linde said a non-certified accountant is someone “who works in the accounting department inputting numbers into corporate spreadsheets, but is not a certified accountant. A lot of companies are using them in order to save costs, but they need to realize they need to pay these people as well.”
He said companies have been split on whether to classify their non-certified accountants as exempt from overtime. But California regulations specify that professionals must be certified to be exempt, he said.
Customs Check
The nation’s first commissioner of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, has re-joined Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP as a partner.
Robert Bonner, a former U.S. attorney in Los Angeles who served as co-chairman of Gibson Dunn’s business crimes and investigations practice group until 2001, will focus on internal investigations and civil litigation and work out of the firm’s Los Angeles and Washington offices.
During his time as head of Customs and Border Protection, Bonner created the “container security initiative,” which secured imports to the U.S. from potential terrorist threats.
Bonner announced his resignation on Sept. 28, about a week before a report by the Homeland Security Department’s Office of the Inspector General revealed conflicts between Bonner’s division and another Homeland Security division, Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The report was prepared in anticipation of a possible merger of the two divisions. Conflicts created competition between the agencies for resources and detracted from security efforts, according to the report. He said his resignation had nothing to do with the recent report.
“I’ve been going a mile a minute since the morning of 9/11, and at the four-year mark I thought I had done my duty,” he said. “That had absolutely nothing to do with my decision to leave.” But he admits that merging the two departments would be a good idea. “By separating out customs investigators from front-line inspectors, it’s cutting off a part of your anatomy,” he said. “It’s like taking a police department and dividing out the uniform cops from the detectives and making two departments with two chiefs. It won’t happen.”
Bonner originally joined Gibson Dunn as a litigation partner in 1993 after serving as administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration for three years. Before that, he was a U.S. district judge in Los Angeles and U.S. attorney of the Central District of California from 1984 to 1989.
Bonner, who has a daughter and grandchildren in Los Angeles, will live in Pasadena.
*Staff reporter Amanda Bronstad can be reached at (323) 549-5225, ext. 225, or at
[email protected]
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