The Jerusalem Regional Labor Court on Tuesday approved a class action lawsuit against the Rami Levy Hashikma Marketing supermarket chain following claims by employees that the company deducted from their salaries amounts that were found to be missing from the cash registers at which they worked.
The decision does not yet rule on the merits of the lawsuit itself, but the court found that there is a reasonable possibility that the proceedings will ultimately be decided in favor of the group of cashiers regarding the alleged violation of the Wage Protection Law.
The proceedings were initiated by Meir Edri and Baruch Shealtiel, who worked as cashiers for the chain. They allege that when a discrepancy was discovered at the end of a shift between the amount of money that should have been in a register and the amount actually present, the cashier was in some cases required to cover the shortfall, with the money deducted from his salary.
According to a report by Globes, the two argue that this practice violates the law. Through the lawsuit, they are seeking to halt the deductions, reimburse employees for money deducted from their salaries, and compensate them accordingly for employment benefits that were affected by the deductions.
The central dispute concerned the interpretation of the Wage Protection Law. Under certain conditions, the law permits an employer to deduct from an employee’s salary a debt owed to the employer when there is a written undertaking. Rami Levy argued that a cash register shortage could constitute such a debt, particularly when the employee had signed and approved the deduction.
At the class-action certification stage, the court rejected that interpretation. Judge Rachel Barg-Hirshberg and the court’s public representatives ruled that the mere existence of a cash register shortage does not automatically make it a “debt" owed by the employee that can be collected directly from the employee’s salary.
According to the decision, the deduction mechanism established by law is intended for clear, fixed and proven debts that are not in dispute, rather than situations in which it must first be determined why the shortage occurred and who bears responsibility for it.
The court was presented with a variety of circumstances that could result in a cash register discrepancy without necessarily involving intentional conduct by the cashier, including an error while processing a transaction, giving a customer incorrect change, accepting a counterfeit banknote, or becoming distracted while working.
The group on whose behalf the lawsuit will proceed includes cashiers who worked for the chain during the seven years preceding the filing of the application and who meet the conditions established in the court’s decision.
The court ordered the chain to pay NIS 25,000 in legal fees to the plaintiffs’ attorneys, as well as NIS 8,000 to the representative plaintiffs.