California Overtime Laws Apply to Non-Residents Working in State

In a unanimous decision, the California Supreme Court has ruled that California’s overtime laws apply to out of state residents working in California.  In the case of Sullivan v Oracle, the court ruled that California employers who bring out of state workers into California must pay overtime for any hours over 8 hours per day, a more stringent rule than is the norm in other states, such as Colorado and Arizona, where the Oracle employees in this case lived. The case involved instructors who perform services for Oracle training their clients on use of their products.  Colorado only requires overtime pay after 40 hours per week or 12 hours per day, while Arizona has no overtime law, and therefore, follows the federal law which applies by default, requiring overtime compensation at one and one-half times the regular rate for hours worked in excess of 40 hours in one workweek. (29 U.S.C. § 207(a)(2)(C).)
The court held that that California’s overtime laws apply expressly to “any work” beyond eight hours in a day by “all individuals” employed in the state, thereby imposing California’s more generous employee overtime laws to non residents such as the Oracle trainers who came to California to work.
California employers must be careful to comply with this new ruling, which holds that an employer bringing non-exempt (i.e. not salaried) workers from other states into California to perform work here must pay those employees overtime at the same rate as required for their California workers.

You can find the link to this case at: https://www.courtinfo.ca.gov/opinions/documents/S170577.PDF.