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The California Professional Exemption
While the California Professional Exemption appears somewhat straightforward to apply in practical terms, sound legal advice from qualified California labor attorneys can prove valuable. Our California labor law attorneys are experienced at reviewing potential employer violations of the California Professional Exemption. Our labor law firm also offers a free claim evaluation of your legal matter. Information about the California Professional Exemption is outlined below.
The California Professional Exemption includes such professions as physicians, attorneys, and teachers. Exempt professional job duties involve the application of advanced, usually specialized, learning or credentials of the type typically associated with the “traditional learned professions” like medicine, accounting, engineering, or law. In most cases a professionally exempt employee will have a specialized academic degree in the field (i.e. law degree, teaching degree). The California Professional Exemption also requires that the employee exercise significant discretion and judgment in performing the job duties. The exercising of this discretion and judgment is in contrast to performing routine mental, mechanical, manual or physical work. An employee performing professional exempt duties is not only performing work that requires advanced knowledge but is using this knowledge or learning to interpret, analyze or make deductions from a set of facts.
While the federal regulations have identified various professions typically included within the Professional Exemption (i.e. accountants, chefs, physician assistants), and those excluded (i.e. paralegals, accounting clerks, bookkeepers, cooks), the courts have varied in their approach to determining whether a particular job constitutes a learned profession. This has proven to be the case in the state of California. A California federal court, in Campbell v. PriceWaterhouseCoopers, LLP, 602 F. Supp. 2d 1163 (E.D. Cal. 2009), recently interpreted the California wage orders and labor code to be ambiguous and thus held that accountants must be CPA licensed in order to meet California’s learned Professional Exemption. The federal regulations have no such ambiguity, however, and do not have a license requirement for accountants. The state of California also regulates the professional exemption as it relates to IT professionals and computer software programmers. This information is covered separately in the section titled Computer/IT Occupations.
As academic training and specialized degrees are offered in new and diverse fields, the areas in which the Professional Exemption may be available will quite naturally expand. Identifying with certainty whether a profession meets the exempt duties and “learned profession” guidelines often takes a qualified California labor law attorney. If you feel your employer may have misclassified you as Professional Exempt, or you have other overtime or labor law violations to discuss, our law firm is here to provide a free claims evaluation.
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