by Scott Douglas
In early 2026, the Long Beach Community College District in Long Beach, California, agreed to an approximately $18 million settlement in a class-action wage-and-hour lawsuit brought by adjunct faculty. The case was backed by the California Teachers Association, which retained outside plaintiff-side employment counsel to litigate the claims.
The significance of this case is not simply the size of the settlement, but what it reveals about how adjunct faculty labor has been structured, compensated, and legally classified within California’s public community college system, and more broadly within higher education nationally.
A Structural, Not Isolated, Wage Question
At first glance, the dispute can appear to be a narrow question of pay equity or contract interpretation. But the underlying issue is more structural: whether the dominant model of adjunct compensation in California community colleges is consistent with state wage-and-hour law.
California law does not only regulate whether employees are paid adequately. It regulates how work time is defined, tracked, and compensated, and it does so with stricter requirements than federal standards.
That distinction is central to understanding why this case emerged and why it carries implications beyond a single district.
Exempt vs. Non-Exempt Work Under California Law
California wage law divides employees into two categories: exempt and non-exempt.
Exempt employees are excluded from overtime protections and detailed timekeeping requirements. To qualify as exempt in California, an employee generally must satisfy both a duties test and a salary-basis test. The salary-basis requirement means the employee receives a predetermined amount at or above a minimum threshold set by law, and that pay is not reduced based on the quantity or quality of work performed.
Non-exempt employees are covered by stricter protections. Every hour worked must be compensated, minimum wage applies to all labor performed, and employers must track and pay for actual work time. California law is especially strict in rejecting compensation systems that attempt to average unpaid labor across paid work. If work is required, it is compensable.
Why Adjunct Faculty Were Long Treated as Exempt
For decades, colleges treated adjunct faculty as exempt professionals under federal labor standards. Under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), teachers are generally exempt from overtime requirements regardless of salary level and are not subject to the same salary-basis rules applied to most other exempt categories.
This federal framework shaped national higher-education practice. Instructional faculty – full-time and part-time – were broadly assumed to fall within a categorical exemption.
For many years, it was assumed this federal approach aligned with California law. That assumption became harder to sustain as California’s wage-and-hour framework evolved independently.
California’s Wage Law Shift in the Early 2000s
Beginning in the early 2000s, California strengthened its wage-and-hour enforcement structure through regulatory changes including Wage Order No. 4-2001 and Labor Code section 515.
These changes reinforced a key principle: exempt status in California depends not only on job duties, but on compliance with a salary-basis requirement.
That created a structural mismatch with adjunct faculty employment in California community colleges. Adjunct instructors are typically not salaried employees. Instead, they are paid based on classroom “contact hours,” with compensation varying by assignment, load, and semester.
At the same time, they are expected to perform substantial additional labor outside the classroom, including grading, preparation, and student communication.
This raises a core legal tension: if adjunct faculty are not properly classified as exempt salaried employees, requiring substantial unpaid labor outside paid instructional time may violate wage-and-hour standards.
How the Issue First Emerged in Private Colleges
The first major legal challenges arose in California’s private nonprofit higher-education sector.
Litigation questioned whether adjunct instructors satisfied California’s salary-basis requirements for exempt status. In response, California enacted Labor Code section 515.7, creating a specific exemption framework for certain private-school teachers, including adjunct faculty at nonprofit colleges and universities.
That statute was widely understood as an attempt to preserve exempt classification in private higher education even where compensation systems did not resemble salaried employment.
However, section 515.7 applies only to private nonprofit institutions. Public colleges and universities, including California’s community college system, are not covered.
Despite this, public institutions largely continued operating under assumptions rooted in federal labor law – faculty were exempt professionals by virtue of their teaching role. As a result, community colleges continued compensating primarily classroom contact hours while treating additional instructional labor as included.
The Long Beach Class Action as a Turning Point
The class-action lawsuit against the Long Beach Community College District challenged that structure directly. It reportedly argued that adjunct faculty were required to perform substantial unpaid work beyond classroom hours, including grading, preparation, office hours, and student communication.
As is typical in wage-and-hour class actions, cases of this type are developed through faculty input and plaintiff-side counsel analysis of compensation practices that appear legally vulnerable. In this case, counsel retained through faculty representation affiliated with the California Teachers Association pursued claims based on those alleged practices.
Reports indicate the court expressed increasing skepticism toward the district’s position as the case progressed, contributing to settlement pressure.
The case ultimately resolved in an approximately $18 million settlement covering roughly 1,400 adjunct faculty.
Broader Implications
The Long Beach settlement highlights a structural issue extending beyond a single district. If adjunct faculty are not properly classified as exempt under California wage law, then compensation systems based on classroom contact hours may not satisfy legal requirements that all required work time be compensated.
That shift is already reflected in litigation trends, with more than 20 similar wage-and-hour class actions now pending against other California community college districts.
The issue has therefore moved beyond individual disputes into a broader reassessment of how adjunct labor is classified and compensated. Under California law, the governing principle is straightforward: If the work is required, the time is compensable.