A salaried lead who frames, pulls wire, or runs a forklift most of the day is not exempt, whatever the title says. And because exempt employees keep no time records, the damages in that case get built from the plaintiff's memory rather than from yours.
The exempt-classification claim has a property that no other wage-and-hour claim has, and it is worth stating before anything else, because it explains why this row is worth more attention than its frequency suggests.
In every other category, the employer's records are the battlefield. Punch data, payroll registers, wage statements — imperfect, sometimes damaging, but the employer's own account of what happened, and available to rebut with.
Exempt employees do not clock in. So when a former operations lead alleges she worked fifty-five hours a week for three years, the number that goes into the damages model is hers. The employer has nothing to put next to it, because the whole premise of the classification was that the hours did not need to be tracked. The plaintiff supplies the estimate, and the defense consists of arguing with a memory.
That asymmetry is structural. It cannot be fixed after the claim arrives.
California's executive, administrative, and professional exemptions require both halves. Failing either one ends the exemption.
The salary basis. A monthly salary equivalent to no less than two times the state minimum wage for full-time employment, which California defines as 40 hours per week. Against the $16.90 minimum wage in effect for 2026, that is $70,304 a year, or $1,352 a week. The computer software professional exemption runs on its own separate figure, $122,573.13 a year for 2026.
The duties. The employee must be primarily engaged in exempt duties, which in California means more than 50 percent of actual working time. Not the job description. Not what the role is supposed to be. What the person actually did, measured by time.
Both halves fail in predictable ways, and the salary half fails in a way that deserves its own paragraph.
The exempt salary floor is defined as a multiple of the minimum wage, so it re-indexes automatically each January 1. The employer does nothing, receives no notice, and is not asked.
Which produces the quietest compliance failure in this whole subject area: a salary that was comfortably above the threshold in 2021 sitting below it in 2026, with the employee still coded exempt, still receiving no overtime, and still keeping no time records. Nobody made a decision. The floor came up and the salary stayed put.
The check takes an hour once a year. Export the exempt roster with current annual salaries, compare each against the current threshold, and look at anyone within a few thousand dollars of it — because a mid-year merit freeze or a reduced-schedule arrangement can push a compliant salary under. Do it in the first week of January, when the new figure takes effect.
One further note on timing: the state minimum wage itself re-indexes, and the derived thresholds move with it. Any figure in this post is the 2026 figure. Check the current number before relying on it rather than carrying ours forward.
Three roles carry most of the risk in an operation of this shape.
The working foreman. A lead paid a salary who spends the morning on the tools and the afternoon on the tools, and does the scheduling in the truck at lunch and the paperwork at home. The title says supervisor. The duties test asks what more than half of the working time consisted of, and the answer is framing, or pouring, or pulling wire.
This is not an edge case in construction; it is close to the standard structure of a small field organization, and it is genuinely hard to fix, because the economics of a fifteen-person crew often do not support a lead who does not work. The lawful answers are to make the role genuinely supervisory, or to pay the position hourly with overtime. What is not available is a title and a salary attached to a job that is mostly production work.
The warehouse supervisor on the floor. Same structure, different setting: a shift lead who picks, loads, and drives the forklift during peaks, which in a seasonal operation means most of the year.
The dispatcher classified as administrative. The administrative exemption requires work directly related to management policies or general business operations, along with the exercise of discretion and independent judgment on matters of significance. A dispatcher executing a routing plan inside parameters somebody else set is performing the operation rather than administering it. The distinction the exemption draws is between shaping policy and carrying it out, and dispatch is nearly always the second one.
A separate note for freight, because it cuts the other way and is frequently missed: drivers subject to DOT or CHP hours-of-service regulation have their own overtime exemption under Wage Order 9, which does not depend on salary at all. That is a different provision with different conditions, and it does not travel to the office staff.
A failed exemption owes daily and weekly overtime for three years — four through the unfair competition statute — with interest and attorney's fees under Labor Code §1194.
Then the derivatives, and there are more of them here than in almost any other claim, because an employee treated as exempt was treated as exempt for everything. No meal periods were provided, so §226.7 premiums are owed. The wage statements did not report hours worked, so they were defective under §226(a). Final pay was computed without the overtime, so waiting-time exposure attaches at separation. Labor Code §558 supplies civil penalties of $50 per underpaid employee per pay period for an initial violation and $100 for subsequent ones, and PAGA stacks its own civil penalties per aggrieved employee per pay period on the 65/35 distribution.
The reasonable-steps caps reach the PAGA civil penalties here as they do anywhere else in wage-and-hour. Note where the money in this claim actually sits, though: in the overtime and the premiums, which the caps do not touch, computed off an hours estimate the employer cannot contradict.
There are four, none of which are difficult, all of which have to predate the dispute.
The exempt roster, with the threshold check dated. Salary, effective date, the threshold in force, and the date somebody verified it. The dated verification is the artifact; the conclusion is not.
A duties analysis for each exempt role, reconciled to what the person does. Not the job description that was written when the position was posted. A current account of how the time is actually spent, and the two should be compared, because the gap between them is what a deposition is made of.
Org-chart evidence for the executive exemption, which requires customarily and regularly directing the work of two or more employees — so the reporting relationships have to be real and documented.
Payroll records showing the salary basis was maintained — no improper deductions that would undercut it.
And then the harder recommendation, which employers resist and which is the single most valuable thing available on this row: have exempt employees in borderline roles record their hours anyway. Not to pay overtime on them, but so that the employer's own contemporaneous data exists if the classification is ever challenged. It converts a claim where the plaintiff supplies the numbers into one where both sides have records. Whether that is the right call for a given role, and how it interacts with the classification argument itself, is a question for your counsel — there are real trade-offs, and they are not ours to weigh.
Which exempt roles nobody has looked at since the salary was set is a question your own roster answers. Bring it, with salaries and the job descriptions, to a discovery call. Whether a given role is properly exempt stays your counsel's call.