Whether California may extend its wage-and-hour laws to flight attendants who spend the vast majority of their workweek outside of California

QUESTION PRESENTED Flight attendants are quintessential employees involved in interstate commerce. They typically spend only a small fraction of their workweek in any one state, and spend most of their working time airborne, where conditions are either regulated by federal law or left deliberately unregulated by the Airline Deregulation Act. As a result, flight attendants traditionally have not been subjected to the wage-andhour laws of any state, let alone the conflicting commands of multiple states, each with a minimal interest in workers who spend almost all of their time elsewhere. The decisions below change all that. Confronted with flight attendants hailing from New York, Nevada, and California, none of whom spent the majority of their workweek in California, but all of whom claimed the benefit of California wage-and-hour law, the Ninth Circuit certified questions for the California Supreme Court. While recognizing that state law generally would not apply to workers who primarily work outside the state, the California Supreme Court fashioned a special rule for “interstate transportation workers.” Under that rule, flight attendants are subject to California wage-and-hour laws as long as they begin their multi-day, multi-state work shifts at a California airport, even if they spend only a small fraction of their workweek working in California and live elsewhere. The Ninth Circuit then found that California’s new approach did not regulate extraterritorially or impermissibly burden interstate commerce. The question presented is: Whether, consistent with the Commerce Clause and the deregulatory preferences of the Airline ii Deregulation Act, California may extend its wageand-hour laws to flight attendants who spend the vast majority of their workweek outside of California simply because they report to a California airport to begin their multi-day, multi-state work shift.