Legal Question in Business Law in California

Re: Repair Compensation

The employees' right to be paid will depend upon their contract with the employer.

Every employee has a contract with his or her employer. It may be a union contract, it may be an individual written contract, perhaps a part of it will be the policies written in a manual, it may be an entirely oral contract, or perhaps there isn't even an express contract of any kind, written or oral, but there will then be an implied contract, and its terms will be found in the practices and understandings found in the ongoing working relationship between employer and employee.

If the employees are fortunate, their contract will guarantee them pay, whether or not they perform any services. There still are some union contracts that guarantee certain minimum earnings per year, per month, per week, etc., and many salaried employees would be deemed to be contractually entitled to be paid at least for a while, but generally they too would be subject to layoff.

The typical arrangement between an hourly worker and the employer would more likely call for an hour's work for an hour's pay. Holidays and vacations are, of course, an exception to that for most workers, but when an emergency shuts down the business, generally the employees are not entitled to pay.

Re: Repair Compensation

Here are a couple of afterthoughts to my previous answer:

(1) It's an interesting question as to whether the employees could sue the other tenant who caused the building damage. The answer is that I don't think a suit would be successful, because one cannot sue for negligence based upon purely economic harm - there must be some kind of non-economic injury, I believe (torts aren't my area of expertise).

(2) I would think the employer could properly offer its employees the option of taking vacation during the shut-down. Nothing wrong with that; it's an opportunity for them to maintain an income while laid off. The employer probably can't force the employees to treat the layoff period as vacation, unless the employer's contract allows the employer to require that vacations be taken at times specified by it. This may be the case in some companies, but usually employees have at least some say in deciding when to take vacation.