The Non-Financial Ledger: What It Actually Costs to Have Your Wages Stolen

Elizabeth Perez worked at a funeral home. She spent her days around grief, around families at their most broken, around the weight of death handled with professionalism and care. That is what Rose Hills sold to the world. Behind the scenes, if this lawsuit is accurate, it sold something different to its own workers: a systematic squeeze on every paycheck.

When a company fails to pay you for all the hours you work, it is not an accounting error. It is a decision. Someone, somewhere, decided that the labor you already performed was not worth the wage they agreed to pay you. You cannot get those hours back. You cannot un-work a shift. The time is gone. What remains is a smaller paycheck and the quiet understanding that your employer looked at your time and decided it was worth less than the law requires.

Meal breaks and rest periods are not perks. They are rights written into California law because legislators recognized that human beings are not machines, that exhaustion causes accidents, that dignity at work requires a moment to breathe. When those breaks are denied or made compensable without compensation, the message is the same: your body’s limits are an inconvenience to production schedules.

For hourly workers at a funeral home, there is no stock option windfall waiting at the end. There is no year-end bonus that might cover the shortfall. The paycheck is the paycheck. If a worker was underpaid by even a modest amount each week over four years, that money does not exist in their life. It did not pay a car payment. It did not cover a kid’s school supplies. It did not sit in savings against the next emergency. It simply disappeared into the operating margin of a Delaware corporation.

The procedural fight described in this court opinion is not abstract. Every month this case spends in procedural limbo is a month the 759 workers in this class do not have answers. The law moves slowly. Workers’ bills do not.

The Facts: What Rose Hills Is Accused Of

This case is built on nine causes of action under California wage-and-hour law. The first four are the core of the dollar figures at stake.

• Count 1 — Unpaid Regular Wages: Rose Hills allegedly failed to pay workers for all regular hours worked. The complaint states this happened “at times” and “throughout the statutory period,” which covers the four years before the suit was filed.
• Count 2 — Unpaid Overtime: Rose Hills allegedly failed to pay required overtime wages to nonexempt employees, meaning hourly workers who by law must receive premium pay for hours beyond the standard workday or workweek.
• Count 3 — Denied Meal Periods: California law requires employers to provide meal breaks under specific conditions. Rose Hills allegedly failed to provide them and failed to pay the legally required premium when those breaks were skipped or interrupted.
• Count 4 — Denied Rest Periods: California law also mandates paid rest breaks. Rose Hills allegedly failed to authorize and permit those breaks and failed to compensate workers when they were denied.
• Counts 5 through 9: The complaint includes five additional causes of action. The court opinion does not detail each one individually, but they collectively contributed to the total amount-in-controversy calculation Rose Hills submitted.
• The Class Period: The class covers all nonexempt, hourly-paid employees of Rose Hills in California during the four years prior to the initial filing. Rose Hills’s own records placed that number at 759 workers.

Rose Hills made that calculation not as an admission of guilt, but to argue that the potential dollar value of the case exceeded $5 million, which is the threshold required to move a class action from state court to federal court. The company’s own math, tethered to the complaint’s language, produced a figure of $15,207,344.

Legal Receipts: What the Court Record Actually Says

Every quote below is taken directly from the Ninth Circuit’s opinion in Perez v. Rose Hills Company, No. 25-68, filed March 14, 2025. No paraphrasing. No invention.

“The district court stated that in responding to the order to show cause, Rose Hills ‘was required to produce evidence supporting its amount-in-controversy estimate.’ In the court’s view, Rose Hills had failed to do so. The court reasoned that Rose Hills’s approach ‘amount[ed] to little more than plucking a violation rate out of the air and calling it reasonable.'” Ninth Circuit Opinion, Perez v. Rose Hills Company, No. 25-68 (March 14, 2025), describing the district court’s findings

“Rose Hills reran its calculations using a violation rate 50 percent lower than its original assumption and arrived at an amount in controversy of $6,853,488—still comfortably above the statutory threshold of $5 million.” Ninth Circuit Opinion, Perez v. Rose Hills Company, No. 25-68 (March 14, 2025)

“It makes little sense to require a CAFA defendant to introduce evidence of the violation rate—really, the alleged violation rate—because the defendant likely believes that the real rate is zero and thus that the evidence does not exist.” Ninth Circuit Opinion, Perez v. Rose Hills Company, No. 25-68 (March 14, 2025), Judge Miller writing for the panel

“If Perez believed that some other assumption would have been more reasonable, she was free to propose that rate. (She was also free to use some more specific phrase than ‘at times’ when drafting the complaint; had she done so, she could have constrained the range of assumptions that Rose Hills could reasonably adopt.)” Ninth Circuit Opinion, Perez v. Rose Hills Company, No. 25-68 (March 14, 2025), Judge Miller writing for the panel

Societal Impact Mapping: Who Gets Hurt When Wage Theft Goes Unchecked

Public Health

Wage theft in physically and emotionally demanding workplaces creates compounding harm that extends well beyond individual paychecks.

• Denied meal and rest breaks in physically demanding roles contribute directly to worker fatigue, reduced cognitive function, and increased rates of on-the-job accidents. Funeral home workers handle heavy equipment, body transport, and chemical embalming agents. Fatigue in this environment is a safety risk, not just an inconvenience.
• Chronic wage suppression compounds financial stress, which is a documented risk factor for anxiety, depression, and stress-related physical illness. For workers already processing death and grief alongside their own financial precarity, this is a sustained psychological burden.
• Unpaid overtime means workers are performing labor without compensation, which in practical terms means longer effective working hours at a reduced hourly rate. Extended work hours without adequate rest periods are associated with increased rates of cardiovascular stress and chronic fatigue disorders.

Economic Inequality

The structural mechanics of this case illustrate exactly how wage theft operates as a wealth transfer from low-wage hourly workers to corporate shareholders.

• The 759 workers in this class are nonexempt, hourly employees. They are, by definition, at the bottom of the wage structure. Rose Hills used California’s minimum wage of $14/hour as the baseline for calculating how little it might owe. These are not workers with negotiating power or golden parachutes.
• Rose Hills is incorporated in Delaware, the preferred state for corporations seeking favorable corporate law, while its workers are in California. The financial extraction flows from California workers to a Delaware-domiciled entity. This is the geography of inequality rendered as a legal filing.
• The CAFA removal mechanism itself functions as a wealth-concentration tool. Federal court litigation is more expensive and slower for plaintiffs than state court. Every procedural delay and jurisdictional fight Rose Hills wins is another period during which unpaid wages remain unpaid and the class members absorb the time cost of waiting.
• Attorney fee awards are calculated as a percentage of total recovery. Rose Hills factored in a 33 percent attorney fee estimate for the plaintiff’s side in its own calculations. When corporations drag out litigation, they erode the real value of any eventual recovery. A $15.2 million claim that takes five years to resolve in the workers’ favor is worth significantly less than $15.2 million at the moment they needed the money.
• The incentive structure for CAFA gaming rewards under-specificity in complaints. As the court itself noted, because Perez used the phrase “at times” rather than specifying a frequency, Rose Hills had room to assume the highest defensible violation rate for jurisdictional purposes. This is a systemic problem that disadvantages every worker’s attorney who has not yet been through this specific procedural lesson.

The “Cost of a Life” Metric

Rose Hills’s own calculations reveal what weekly systematic wage violations look like when translated into real money, multiplied across a real workforce, over real time.

What Now? The Lawsuit Is Still Alive. Here Is What to Watch.

The Ninth Circuit’s ruling was a procedural win for Rose Hills, not a verdict. The wage theft case returns to the district court for the judge to re-evaluate the jurisdictional question under the correct legal standard. If the district court finds jurisdiction is proper, the case proceeds in federal court. If not, it goes back to California state court. Either way, Elizabeth Perez and 759 workers are still waiting for answers.

The People Running Rose Hills

• Rose Hills Company is identified in the opinion as a Delaware corporation operating a funeral home and mortuary in Whittier, California. Specific executive names and board member names are not disclosed in the court record used for this report. The corporate roles that matter here are: the executives who set the company’s payroll and scheduling policies that Perez’s complaint describes as systematically violating California law.
• Defense counsel on the appeal: Carrie M. Francis and Lonnie J. Williams Jr. of Stinson LLP, Phoenix, Arizona.
• Plaintiff’s counsel: Edward Kim, John G. Yslas, Eugene Zinovyev, Andrew Sandoval, Aram Boyadjian, and Jeffrey Bils of Wilshire Law Firm, Los Angeles, California.

Regulatory Watchlist

• California Labor Commissioner’s Office (DLSE): The primary California state agency for wage theft complaints. Workers who believe they are being denied wages, overtime, or legally required breaks can file a wage claim directly. The process is free and does not require an attorney.
• California Civil Rights Department (CRD): Relevant if labor violations intersect with protected class characteristics. Also tracks patterns of employer misconduct.
• U.S. Department of Labor — Wage and Hour Division (WHD): Federal oversight of overtime and minimum wage compliance under the Fair Labor Standards Act, which runs parallel to California’s state protections in some circumstances.
• California Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA): This is not a regulatory body but a law that allows workers to sue on behalf of the state for labor code violations. PAGA cases operate separately from class actions and cannot be waived by arbitration agreements. It is one of the most powerful enforcement tools available to California workers and their attorneys.
• National Labor Relations Board (NLRB): If Rose Hills is discouraging workers from discussing wages or organizing around these claims, the NLRB is the relevant agency. Wage secrecy policies that chill collective action are an unfair labor practice.

What You Can Do

• If you are or were a Rose Hills employee in California, contact the Wilshire Law Firm in Los Angeles. The class period covers all nonexempt, hourly California employees for four years prior to the initial filing. You may be a class member.
• Document everything now. Keep personal records of your hours worked, break times (or their absence), and pay stubs. California law gives workers broad rights to their own employment records. Request yours in writing. Your employer must provide them within 21 days.
• Talk to your coworkers. Wage theft scales with silence. The class action mechanism works because individual claims that are too small to litigate alone become collectively powerful. You cannot be fired or retaliated against for discussing your wages with coworkers under federal law.
• Connect with local labor organizations in the greater Los Angeles area. Groups like the UCLA Labor Center, the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, and community-based worker centers offer free guidance, know-your-rights workshops, and connections to legal resources for low-wage workers facing employer violations.
• If you work at any funeral home, mortuary, or cemetery in California under similar conditions, the legal framework in this case applies to you too. Rose Hills is not unique. File a complaint with the California Labor Commissioner regardless of whether you have an attorney.