Alaska Airlines, Virgin America, and other airlines must comply with California’s meal and rest break laws, a flight attendants union, 20 states, Washington, D.C., and California’s attorney general told the Ninth Circuit.
Federal aviation law doesn’t preempt state employment law, and state regulation of a national employer’s in-state interests doesn’t implicate or violate the Commerce Clause, they said in three separate friend of the court briefs filed Jan. 6 in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
At stake is a federal trial court’s $77 million award to flight attendants who successfully proved that Alaska Airlines and Virgin ...