Airline service workers entitled to breaks, appeals court rules

The federal Airline Deregulation Act doesn’t exempt companies that provide services to airlines — like security for in-flight food catering — from California’s labor laws, a state appeals court ruled Friday.

The Second District Court of Appeal in Los Angeles reinstated a former employee’s proposed class-action suit against SCIS Air Security Corp., which does security checks on catering equipment for incoming and outgoing planes.

Employees search the food for weapons, seal food carts before flights, and conduct their inspections whenever planes arrive or are about to leave, causing some fluctuations in schedules because of flight delays.

A Superior Court judge agreed and dismissed the suit but was overruled by the appeals court, which said recent state and federal court rulings have shown that states can still enforce labor laws against transportation companies.

[...] the state Supreme Court ruled last year that truck drivers could sue a company that had reclassified them as independent contractors instead of employees, reducing their benefits under state law.