A federal judge greenlighted Apple’s $30.5 million settlement plan for a 2013 lawsuit alleging the company failed to compensate its retail workers for time spent navigating mandatory security screenings.
Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California gave the settlement final approval Saturday, covering 14,683 California employees in the largest known settlement for that type of case, Bloomberg Law reported.
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Plaintiffs claimed they often waited between 10 and 15 minutes during mandatory off-the-clock searches of their bags before leaving the store, a measure intended to prevent workers from stealing Apple products.
The bag searches referenced in the lawsuit, which took place between 2009 and 2015, were “embarrassing and demeaning,” plaintiffs said in the lawsuit. Apple has since ended the mandatory bag searches of its employees, per the report.
Apple stressed in court that employees had the option of leaving their bags at home. Initially, Alsup dismissed the case in 2015, concluding that employees did not need to take personal items with them into the workplace.
However, an appeals court subsequently directed the California Supreme Court to weigh the case under state law, and California’s high court ultimately ruled in favor of the employees. The court concluded employees have reason to bring personal items to work and expect to be compensated for the time during the searches.
Piggybacking off the ruling, Alsup took up the case again, which led to Apple agreeing to a roughly $30 million settlement last year pending final approval.
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Other retailers such as Amazon and Walmart have been hit with comparable lawsuits, the New York Post reported. Amazon doled out $8.7 million to 42,000 in a settlement for one of the suits, per the news outlet.
