Plaintiff Devon Labella was employed by Cox in 2021 as a non-exempt employee. He was paid on an hourly basis, and entitled to the legally required meal and rest periods and payment of minimum and overtime wages due for all time worked. His complaint, which is currently pending in the Orange County Superior Court, claims that Cox:
- Failed to accurately record employees’ time — meaning workers may have been under-paid.
- Paid less than required minimum and overtime wages.
- Denied legally-mandated meal and rest breaks.
- Failed to provide accurate, itemized wage statements.
- Didn’t reimburse employees for necessary work-related expenses.
- Didn’t properly compensate for sick time and other owed wages.
The lawsuit also notes problems with “rounding” employee hours. According to Labella’s attorney, this can mean that the company’s timekeeping system rounded hours in a way that shortchanged workers rather than paid them for the actual time worked.
Cox Payroll Settlement
This isn’t the first rodeo on payroll complaints for Cox. The court found in 2021 that Cox violated California labor law by overtime-rounding and unpaid overtime for installers and technicians. In June 2021, Law360 reported that Cox Communications technicians secured class certification on their claims that the company rounded down their hours and did not provide appropriate wage statements, after a California federal judge’s approval. The lawsuit was initially filed in 2019 by a former Cox technician who claimed the company would round the timesheets of nonexempt employees to the nearest 15-minute increment, which resulted in “a systematic underpayment of wages.” Rounding the hours resulted in more than 6,000 hours of unpaid wages for the proposed class from 2015 to 2019.
READ MORE CALIFORNIA LABOR LAW LEGAL NEWS
In November 2021, Cox reached a $1.85 million settlement, which begs the question: why does Cox repeat violations when it already paid a huge settlement? Because large companies like Cox Communications (the third largest cable provider in the U.S. with nearly 7 million customers) may see wage lawsuits as:
- A one-time payout,
- No admission of wrongdoing,
- No criminal penalty,
- No executive consequences.
So, it’s cost-efficient to write a big settlement check every few years rather than tweak payroll systems. And once the ink dries, the company can quietly keep using the same timekeeping logic because the settlement typically addresses past conduct and not future behavior. And unless companies are really pressured into changing how they track time—not just how they pay it out later—history tends to repeat itself, as many California labor lawyers can attest.
Case No. 30-2025-01521582-CU-OE-CXC, is currently pending in the Orange County Superior Court of the State of California.
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