www.montereycountyweekly.com February 16-22, 2023 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 13 Former and current employees of the Pebble Beach Company are receiving settlement checks as a result of a class action lawsuit that accused the golf resort operator of wage theft in violation of California labor laws. In September, PBC finalized a $630,000 settlement to resolve a complaint filed in Monterey County Superior Court by two former employees, William Davis and Sabrina Pellegrini, who alleged a “systemic pattern” of wage violations. Allegations included a failure to pay accurate wages by “rounding time punches in [PBC’s] favor,” requiring employees to work “off the clock” while “failing to compensate [them]...for those hours,” and “regularly [denying employees] the ability to take any meal or rest breaks,” among other claims. While PBC denied all of the allegations in court and made no admission of wrongdoing as part of the settlement, the company has since begun disbursing money to employees who worked there between November 2020 and September 2022. Among those employees is Alan Estrada of Carmel, who says he recently received a settlement check in the mail for $6.38 related to his previous part-time work as a bartender at events like the AT&T Pro-Am and the Concours d’Elegance. “They were changing people’s hourly wages without them knowing it, and [paying them] lower wages than they were supposed to be,” Estrada says. “I noticed that they were changing what I was making every hour, [and] the way they started taking our tips and giving us what they wanted out of the tip jar.” Estrada says supervisors on occasion would not provide a meal period as employees are entitled to by law— “They wouldn’t let you sit down; you couldn’t take a break,” he recalls. These experiences were part and parcel of a “really gross” overall culture at Pebble Beach that treated service workers like him poorly, Estrada says. “They break you like a horse. You’re watched and judged extremely closely…They have a mold, and they make their employees fit their mold.” In a statement, the company says it “believes it fully complied with the law in these matters but elected to settle the lawsuits to avoid the time, costs and distraction of litigation,” and had awarded eligible employees with payments ranging from $2 to $72. The lawsuit was brought against PBC through the Private Attorneys General Act, which allows aggrieved employees to recover civil penalties but not the actual wages they may have wrongly lost. The bulk of the $630,000 settlement was awarded not to employees, but plaintiff law firms Aegis Law Firm and Frontier Law Center—who received nearly $242,000 in fees and litigation costs—and the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency, which received 75 percent of $376,750 in PAGA penalties, or roughly $282,500. Employees were awarded the remaining 25 percent of PAGA penalties, or roughly $94,000, while plaintiffs Davis and Pellegrini received their own individual settlements: $10,000 to Davis, according to court filings, and an undisclosed amount to Pellegrini. In The Rough Pebble Beach Co. employees are receiving settlements from a wage theft lawsuit. By Rey Mashayekhi Court filings do not specify the exact number of employees included in the class, but they detail more than 41,000 pay periods, meaning hundreds, if not thousands, of employees may be eligible. NEWS “They break you like a horse.” DANIEL DREIFUSS Carmel RiverSteelhead Rescued in the lower river in late spring Sorted by size and reared during summer/fall Released in the winter when the rain comes Nurturing the Watershed WATER MATTERS Every winter, the MPWMD fisheries team releases thousands of steelhead to migrate to the Pacific. The marine nutrients they accumulate from the ocean will nurture the Carmel River watershed when they return to spawn. Sign up for our Water Supply Newsletter. MPWMD.net We care for them. They care for us.
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