The Second District Court of Appeal held: “To show liability under section 2802, an employee need only show that he or she was required to use a personal cell phone to make work-related calls, and he or she was not reimbursed.” The appellate court observed that the purpose of section 2802 is “to prevent employers from passing their operating expenses on to their employers.”[3] Therefore, the issues raised by the trial court—the type of service plan the employee has, who pays for the plan, and whether the employee changed plans because of his job—are irrelevant. “If an employee is required to make work-related calls on a personal cell phone, then he or she is incurring an expense for purposes of section 2802 . . . . [R]eimbursement is always required. Otherwise, the employer would receive a windfall because it would be passing its operating expenses on to the employee.”
Therefore, regardless of whether an employee has a limited or unlimited cell phone plan, the employer’s obligation is the same: “The reimbursement owed is a reasonable percentage of [the employees’] cell phone bills.” Employers have a duty to determine what that reasonable percentage is, and to reimburse their employees according

