Cornn v. United Parcel Service: $87 Million Settlement for 23,600 California Drivers Denied Meal and Rest Breaks

For years, UPS package-car drivers across California faced a daily arithmetic problem they could not solve. The company programmed its dispatch systems to automatically deduct a standard lunch period from every driver's timesheet, whether or not the driver actually stopped to eat. Delivery quotas and tight route windows left many workers eating behind the wheel or skipping breaks entirely, while the payroll system recorded a full, unworked meal break regardless.

A class action filed in 2003 in the Northern District of California put those practices on trial. The complaint covered roughly 23,600 current and former California UPS drivers and alleged three distinct violations of California labor law: automatic deduction of meal-period pay without confirming drivers actually took the break; failure to provide a first meal period within five hours of the start of a shift; and failure to provide a second meal period when drivers worked shifts of ten hours or longer. The case was captioned Cornn v. United Parcel Service, Inc., No. 3:03-cv-02001, and was assigned to District Judge Thelton Henderson.

William Kershaw of what was then Kershaw Cutter and Ratinoff, together with Wendy York of York Law Corporation, served as co-lead class counsel for the plaintiffs. The litigation produced an early and significant legal ruling from Judge Henderson establishing that California meal-period pay constitutes a wage subject to the state's wage-payment statutes -- a holding that shaped subsequent wage-and-hour litigation across the state.

The parties reached a settlement in 2006. Judge Henderson granted final approval on April 9, 2007. UPS agreed to pay $87 million in a non-reversionary fund, the largest class-action settlement in California history grounded solely in meal-period, rest-period, and pay-stub violations at the time. Individual drivers received varying amounts based on hours worked and the severity of the violations recorded; some class members received up to $20,000. Approximately $4 million in unclaimed funds was directed in equal shares to the San Francisco and Los Angeles food banks rather than reverting to UPS.

The settlement was also accompanied by a behavioral change: UPS overhauled its meal-and-rest-break policies for California drivers eight months after the lawsuit was filed, a shift the litigation is credited with accelerating. Wendy York and William Kershaw were named finalists for the Consumer Attorneys of California 2007 Consumer Attorney of the Year award for their work on the case.