On his very first day, Butte Sand Trucking’s safety director told Stephen Dieves that every driver signs away their meal break rights — and if he didn’t like it, he could do what everyone else does and “eat at 55 miles per hour.”

A Company That Ran on Stolen Time

Stephen Dieves drove trucks for Butte Sand Trucking Company, Butte Sand and Gravel, and Bailey Heavy Equipment Hauling — three companies operating collectively as Butte Sand — for approximately nine months in 2018. He hauled construction materials in California, spending full workdays behind the wheel with no break from duty.

Under California law, every non-exempt employee must receive a 30-minute off-duty meal break for every five hours worked. If the employer fails to provide one, the employer owes the worker one extra hour of pay at their regular rate for every day the break was not provided. That is a legal floor, a minimum standard. Butte Sand treated it like a suggestion.

Dieves sued for failure to provide meal and rest breaks, failure to reimburse work-related expenses, violation of California’s unfair competition law, and brought a representative PAGA claim — meaning he sued on behalf of the entire workforce, acting as a stand-in for the state itself to enforce California’s labor laws.

The Conga Line of Compliance Theater

Butte Sand had an employee handbook that, on paper, looked like it followed California law. The company even installed an in-truck communications system that automatically pinged drivers when it was time for a meal or rest break. Both of these things were real. Both were also, according to Dieves and the evidence, completely meaningless in practice.

Dieves observed that drivers formed what he described as a “conga line” when loading trucks and delivering materials — a continuous loop where trucks cycled through the same order all day without anyone breaking formation to eat, rest, or stop. He never once saw a single driver take a meal or rest break. He was never relieved of duty for one himself.

The time records Butte Sand produced for the case confirmed what Dieves described. Across a random sample covering approximately 2% of all shifts worked between May 2015 and November 2021 — over 1,300 individual shift records for shifts lasting five or more hours — there was not a single recorded meal break entry. The company’s own office manager confirmed she found no records showing meal period premium pay was ever provided to any driver during those shifts.

What the Numbers Actually Say

Dieves’ expert statistician analyzed the time records and projected that between 99.78% and 100% of all shifts lasting five or more hours during the proposed class period would show no recorded meal break. That is a projection built on Butte Sand’s own data, using Butte Sand’s own records. The company produced those records. The math does the rest.

What They Actually Stole

California’s meal break law is not a technicality. It is a recognition that a human being sitting in a truck cab for eight, nine, or ten hours without a break to eat, stretch, breathe, or exist outside of work is being treated as a machine. The legal right to stop the truck, step out, and be a person for thirty minutes exists because people fought and organized to make it exist. Butte Sand voided that right on day one of employment.

Think about what “eat at 55 miles per hour” means in practice. A driver managing a loaded commercial truck through California roads while eating whatever food they brought — because stopping was not “the Butte Sand way” — is a driver whose attention is divided, whose body is not resting, whose mind is still fully on the job. The meal break is being stolen in the most literal sense: the worker’s body is present, the worker’s attention is on the road, and the company is benefiting from every minute of it without paying the legally required penalty.

The person who trained Stephen Dieves told him this directly: drivers do not take meal periods because that is not “the Butte Sand way,” unless they crossed state lines. That single sentence contains an entire labor philosophy. The “Butte Sand way” means compliance is conditional, rights are geographic, and the workers who stay in California get the least. A new hire, on his first day, was being socialized into accepting this as normal.

Dieves did object. He told the safety director that California law required off-duty meal periods. The safety director’s response was to tell him everyone signs the on-duty meal period agreement and he would have to do what everyone else did. That agreement, in California law, is only valid if employees can revoke it at any time. The question of whether any driver at Butte Sand was ever meaningfully told they could revoke it is exactly the kind of question the appeals court now wants a trial court to answer properly — with the burden of proof on the company, not the workers.

They Said It Out Loud. Here It Is.

“The safety director told Dieves ‘every driver signs the Agreement’ and he ‘would have to do what every other driver did — “Eat at 55 miles per hour” ‘ because no one takes a meal break.” — Declaration of Stephen Dieves, as cited in the Court of Appeal Opinion (Filed Dec. 11, 2025)

“The person who trained him said ‘drivers did not take meal periods, because that was not “the Butte Sand[‘]s way,” unless they crossed state lines.'” — Declaration of Stephen Dieves, as cited in the Court of Appeal Opinion (Filed Dec. 11, 2025)

“Butte Sand’s office manager declared she found no records showing a meal period premium was paid to any of the drivers who worked the shifts on the days identified in the time records.” — Court of Appeal Opinion, Discussion Section I.B.1 (Filed Dec. 11, 2025)

“Dieves’ expert declared that he looked at the time records, used inferential statistical analysis, and projected that 99.78 percent to 100 percent of the shifts lasting five or more hours during the proposed class period would not have a recorded meal break.” — Court of Appeal Opinion, Discussion Section I.B.2 (Filed Dec. 11, 2025)

“Dieves observed drivers ‘form sort of a conga line’ when loading trucks and delivering construction materials and he observed that ‘the trucks generally retained the same order in the conga line throughout the day, with none stopping for meal or rest periods.’ Dieves never observed a single driver take a meal or rest break.” — Declaration of Stephen Dieves, as cited in the Court of Appeal Opinion (Filed Dec. 11, 2025)

The Courts Gave. The Courts Took Away. Then Gave Back.

The trial court initially denied class certification of the meal break claim. The reasoning: the time records showing zero meal breaks did not prove Butte Sand discouraged breaks, because maybe drivers just chose not to take them voluntarily. That logic placed the entire burden of proof on the workers — and ignored a critical legal presumption that California’s Supreme Court had already established.

The Rule Butte Sand Hoped the Trial Court Would Forget

In a 2021 decision called Donohue v. AMN Services, the California Supreme Court established a clear rule: when time records show missed meal breaks with no indication that premium pay was provided, a legal presumption arises that the employer violated the law. The employer then has to prove its workers chose to skip breaks voluntarily — the company carries that burden, not the worker.

The trial court in Dieves’ case never applied that presumption. Instead, it treated the workers’ evidence as insufficient and accepted Butte Sand’s counter-declarations from 14 drivers who said they were never pressured to skip breaks. The appeals court ruled this was a legal error. Once over 1,300 records of uncompensated missed meal breaks exist with zero premium pay, the presumption kicks in automatically. The company has to disprove it. The trial court had the burden backward.

Butte Sand’s PAGA Killshot Also Failed

Butte Sand tried a second strategy to destroy the case: convince the trial court to strike Dieves’ PAGA claim as “unmanageable.” PAGA — the Labor Code Private Attorneys General Act — allows workers to sue on behalf of the state to collect civil penalties for labor violations against all affected workers, not just themselves. Butte Sand argued that because 75 drivers covering the relevant period would each need to testify individually, the case was too complicated to run.

The trial court agreed and struck the PAGA claim. The appeals court reversed that decision too, citing a 2024 California Supreme Court ruling in Estrada v. Royalty Carpet Mills that directly held trial courts have no authority to dismiss PAGA claims on manageability grounds. The legislative intent behind PAGA is to maximize enforcement of labor laws. Letting companies escape accountability because their violations are large and complex would gut the statute entirely.

This Isn’t One Truck Driver’s Problem

Economic Inequality: Who Pays When Companies Steal Time

The proposed class period runs from May 2015 to December 2018. The PAGA claim covers a narrower window from March 2018 to December 27, 2018, affecting 75 drivers who logged an average of 155 shifts each during that period alone — a total of 11,645 individual shift records. Every one of those shifts lasting over five hours was potentially a stolen meal break. Every stolen meal break was a stolen hour of premium pay that the law says those workers were owed.

California’s meal break premium is one additional hour of pay at the employee’s regular rate per violation. Truck drivers doing hard physical and mental labor — managing heavy commercial vehicles in California traffic — are not hourly workers who can easily absorb that loss. For workers paid by the mile or the hour, a stolen meal break premium per shift, compounded across a class of over 200 drivers over years, represents a significant transfer of wealth upward: out of workers’ pockets and onto Butte Sand’s balance sheet.

The broader context matters here. California’s trucking industry is a sector where many workers are immigrants, many are classified in ways that reduce their legal protections, and many lack the resources to sue their employers individually. PAGA exists precisely because individual lawsuits are often economically irrational — the cost of litigation exceeds the individual recovery. Butte Sand’s decision to fight class certification and kill the PAGA claim was a calculated bet that most workers would rather eat at 55 miles per hour than fight a company in court for years.

Public Health: Driving Hungry Is Not a Performance Review Issue

The health dimension of denying truck drivers meal breaks is not abstract. Commercial truck driving is classified as a safety-sensitive occupation by federal regulators for a reason. Cognitive impairment from hunger and fatigue directly increases the risk of accidents. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration — the very agency whose preemption decision may benefit Butte Sand in this case — exists in large part because tired and impaired commercial drivers kill people on public roads.

A company culture that trains drivers from day one to see a mandatory meal break as something that only happens “if you cross state lines” is a company that has normalized operating impaired as standard procedure. The 14 driver declarations Butte Sand used in its defense stated that most drivers preferred to skip breaks to finish shifts earlier. Whether that preference was genuinely free, or was shaped by years of being socialized into “the Butte Sand way,” is exactly the question this case forces onto the table.

The Math Behind the Theft

How Federal Law Might Let Butte Sand Walk

Here is the part of this story that should make every California truck driver furious. On December 28, 2018, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration issued what is called the Preemption Decision. It concluded that California’s meal and rest break rules are federally preempted — meaning federal law cancels them out — for drivers of property-carrying commercial motor vehicles covered by federal hours-of-service rules. California, the decision says, “may no longer enforce” those rules.

The Ninth Circuit upheld that decision in 2022. The majority of courts that have examined the question have concluded that the preemption applies regardless of when the underlying conduct happened — meaning even violations from before December 2018 may be uncollectable in court today because the law being violated has since been preempted. The California appeals court in this case agreed with the Ninth Circuit’s reasoning and rejected the contrary conclusion reached by an earlier California appellate decision.

This creates an almost obscenely convenient outcome for companies like Butte Sand. A federal administrative decision in late 2018 — issued months after Dieves left the company — may function as a retroactive shield against all the meal and rest break violations committed during his tenure. The appeals court did not decide the preemption question for Dieves’ PAGA claim outright; it sent the case back to the trial court to determine whether Butte Sand’s specific drivers were covered by the federal hours-of-service rules. That determination will decide whether any meaningful accountability is even possible.

What You Can Do With This Information

Corporate Roles to Watch

• Owner / Leadership of Butte Sand Trucking Company [REDACTED – Not in Source]
• Owner / Leadership of Butte Sand and Gravel [REDACTED – Not in Source]
• Owner / Leadership of Bailey Heavy Equipment Hauling, Inc. [REDACTED – Not in Source]
• Safety Director, Butte Sand (the person who told Dieves to “eat at 55 mph”) [REDACTED – Not in Source]

Regulatory Watchlist

• California Labor Commissioner’s Office (Cal/OSHA) — enforce meal and rest break laws at the state level
• California Department of Industrial Relations — oversee wage theft and labor code compliance
• Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) — the agency whose preemption decision may shield Butte Sand from accountability
• California Attorney General’s Office — authority to act on unfair business practice claims under California Business and Professions Code § 17200
• DOL Wage and Hour Division — federal oversight of wage theft in industries with interstate operations

The Path Forward

If you drive a commercial truck in California and your employer has ever told you that breaks are not “how things work here,” you have legal rights that survived this ruling. Contact a California employment attorney about PAGA claims — PAGA exists specifically so workers can sue on behalf of each other without needing to fund a class action individually. Connect with the Teamsters Local in your area and with worker center organizations in the Central Valley that organize truck drivers and warehouse workers. Mutual aid between drivers — sharing information about rights, documenting violations together, refusing to accept that eating behind the wheel is just “the way it is” — is the only leverage that has ever forced companies like Butte Sand to change.