A former employee is suing V. Sattui Winery, claiming that the St. Helena winemaker engaged in wage abuse against him and his colleagues.
In a lawsuit filed on June 14 in Napa County Superior Court, Edwin Quisenberry brought the allegations against V. Sattui Winery, seeking class-action certification. According to the suit, the class of former and current winery workers is estimated to be more than 50 people.
Messages left with the plaintiff's attorneys and V. Sattui Winery were not returned by Friday afternoon.
The suit states that while Quisenberry and his colleagues were working over 40 hours per week, they were not being paid accordingly with overtime. In addition, they were not being given the meal and rest breaks that are required by the state Industrial Welfare Commission, which regulates pay and working conditions.
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Whenever a meal or rest period was missed, late or interrupted, Quisenberry and his colleagues were not compensated with an extra hour of pay, the suit alleges.
Due to having to work through what was supposed to be their meal breaks without proper compensation, and having to work unpaid overtime, V. Sattui employees were not receiving at least minimum wage for all of the hours that they worked, according to the complaint.
Upon resignation or discharge, Quisenberry and his co-workers did not receive the wages owed them, including “overtime and minimum wages and meal and rest period premiums,” the suit states.
The lawsuit alleges that employees were not given complete and accurate wage statements required by California law. One deficiency described in the suit was V. Sattui’s failure to include the total number of hours worked by employees.
The suit alleges that V. Sattui had the financial ability to compensate Quisenberry and other workers, but instead “willfully, knowingly, and intentionally failed to do so, and falsely represented to Plaintiff and the other class members that they were properly denied wages, all in order to increase Defendants’ profits.”
Napa attorney Conor Trombetta, who is not working the case but has experience representing plaintiffs in employment disputes, said that wineries are a certain type of business that could be susceptible to disputes such as the one involving V. Sattui. That could be due to having more seasonal employees, having many different types of employees, and the absence of the larger human resources departments found in corporations.
“I haven’t seen a lot of it myself, but I could see why that could be a larger growing trend in the community,” he said. “Just based on the types of employees that these wineries have, the types of work that they’re engaging in and how difficult it can be for a winery to ensure that everybody is getting paid overtime, that they’re tracking it properly, that everybody’s getting breaks.”
Trombetta said Quisenberry's bid for a class-action lawsuit could make the case more complex.
“It could take longer because with class actions, they need to provide notice to all of the members of the class and they need to get the settlements approved by the court," he said. "So it’s a little bit different than your standard case.”
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