Valdivia v. TICKET CLINIC, Cal: Court of Appeal, 2nd Appellate Dist., 3rd Div. 2022
Section 226, subdivision (a) states that an “employer, semimonthly or at the time of each payment of wages, shall furnish to his or her employee, either as a detachable part of the check, draft, or voucher paying the employee’s wages, or separately if wages are paid by personal check or cash, an accurate itemized statement in writing” showing the types of information about wages that Valdivia asserted in his complaint had not been provided.
“`Furnish’ means to `provide with what is needed,’ or to `supply’ or `give.’ (Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dict. (10th ed. 1993) p.474, col. 1.)” (Canales v. Wells Fargo Bank, N.A. (2018) 23 Cal.App.5th 1262, 1270 [discussing section 226, subd. (a)].) Apart from specifying that the wage statement must be a detachable part of the check, “section 226 describes no other specific means by which an employer is to furnish the itemized statement to an employee.” (Ibid.)
Subdivision (a) of section 226 nowhere states that an employer must send an employee a hard copy of the wage statement or provide it by any other specified means. The Department of Industrial Relations’s Division of Labor Standards has long allowed employers to comply with section 226, subdivision (a) by making electronic wage statements available to employees so long as these statements can be easily accessed and converted to hard copy at no expense, and the employee retains the right to receive a paper record.