The district court did not abuse its discretion in certifying a class of employees all of whom worked solely on commissions. That compensation structure violates California’s minimum wage laws if the employees are required to perform tasks not directly involved in selling. Whether employees were required to perform non-sales-related tasks was a sufficiently common question to satisfy Fed. R. Civ. P. 23’s commonality requirement. Predominance was not undermined by the fact that damages had to be calculated individually for each employee. The 9th Circuit interprets Comcast Corp. v. Behrend, 133 S.Ct. 1426 (2013) to preclude class certification only when the plaintiff cannot show through common evidence that the defendant’s wrongful act caused each class member damage. Here, there was no causation problem since any violation of the minimum wage law ipso facto resulted in lower compensation to each worker. Proof of damages by representative sampling is also not forbidden by the Rules Enabling Act.
Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals (Graber, J.); June 8, 2016; 2016 WL 3190862