Quick Hits
- In Winn v. Blakeslee Vineyard Estate, Inc., 352 Or App 803 (2026), the Oregon Court of Appeals resolved a previously unsettled question under ORS 652.615 in the employer’s favor.
- The court affirmed the dismissal of the plaintiff’s class claims under ORCP 32 I’s notice-and-cure mechanism and separately affirmed the dismissal of her individual claims for failure to prosecute.
- Chief Judge Lagesen dissented, concluding that the plain text of ORS 652.615 tied the $200 remedy to each paycheck from which wages are unlawfully withheld, not to a category of violation.
- The court also rejected the reasoning of an amicus brief that had urged an even more expansive reading—a separate $200 award for every discrete unlawful deduction.
Legal Framework
ORS 652.610(3) prohibits Oregon employers from withholding, deducting, or diverting any portion of an employee’s wages except in specifically enumerated circumstances. ORS 652.615 provides for “a private cause of action for a violation of ORS 652.610(3) for actual damages or $200, whichever is greater.” The statute doesn’t say whether that $200 figure is available per paycheck, per discrete deduction, or per category of violation in the aggregate.
ORCP 32 I gives employers a pretrial “cure” mechanism in class litigation: a defendant can defeat class allegations for damages by showing it has (1) identified (or made reasonable efforts to identify) the class, (2) notified members that it will provide compensation or correction on request, (3) provided or will provide that remedy within a reasonable time, and (4) ceased the challenged conduct.
Background
Clarissa Winn worked as an hourly employee in Blakeslee Vineyard Estate’s tasting room for about eight months in 2022. After resigning, she sued individually and as a putative class representative, alleging that the winery had misappropriated employees’ tip money, failed to compensate employees for all hours worked, and improperly deducted bonuses from paychecks.
Blakeslee moved to dismiss the class allegations under ORCP 32 I, submitting evidence that it had notified affected employees of the alleged violations and its plan to compensate them. The trial court (Judge Melvin Oden-Orr) found the notice insufficient and abated the case for sixty days, so Blakeslee could supplement it—but in doing so, the court had to resolve the parties’ dispute over what ORS 652.615’s $200 figure actually measured. Winn argued for a per-paycheck reading; Blakeslee argued for a per-category reading. The trial court sided with Blakeslee and, after Blakeslee had cured under that standard, dismissed the class claims. The trial court eventually dismissed the remainder of the case for want of prosecution. Winn’s motion to set that judgment aside was denied, and Winn appealed.
The Court of Appeals’ Analysis
The Statutory Damages Question
Writing for the majority, Judge Kamins worked through the State v. Gaines text-context-legislative-history framework at length, finding the bare text unhelpful: a “violation” could plausibly mean either a discrete act or an aggregate category, and parsing the indefinite article “a” (as Winn had tried to do) did not resolve it. The legislative history was more telling: ORS 652.615’s private right of action was grafted onto a preexisting criminal wage-violation statute that used the word “each” to signal per-instance penalties, and the legislature deliberately did not carry that word over when it created the civil remedy.
The court also pointed to a neighboring provision, ORS 652.100(2), where the legislature had explicitly written that “each pay period” constituted a separate violation—language conspicuously absent from ORS 652.615. Finally, the committee history showed lawmakers repeatedly worried about the bill “zinging” small employers with stacking penalties, and thus deliberately set the $200 figure low enough to keep these claims in district and small-claims court, which the majority found inconsistent with a reading that allowed the number to multiply per paycheck. In addition, the court drew support from the Oregon Supreme Court’s analysis of a structurally similar damages provision in Oregon’s landlord-tenant statute.
The majority’s bottom line: ORS 652.615 imposed a $200 statutory damage “for each type of statutory violation in the aggregate, not each discrete time the violation occurred”—rejecting both Winn’s per-paycheck theory and an amicus party’s per-discrete-deduction theory.
The Dissent
Although she agreed with the majority’s disposition of the individual claims, Chief Judge Lagesen dissented on the damages question. In her view, the plain text of ORS 652.615 controlled, authorizing damages for “a violation.” Judge Lagesen reasoned that because a violation of ORS 652.610(3) occurs each time an employer issues a paycheck containing an unlawful withholding, a cause of action—and the accompanying $200 penalty—accrues per paycheck. She would have reversed the dismissal of the class claims on that basis and remanded, including a remand of the individual-claims dismissal, so the trial court could reconsider it in light of the surviving class claims.
Key Takeaways for Employers
- Available damages for a wrongful deduction under ORS 652.615 are limited. A single category of violation entitles a plaintiff to the greater of actual damages or $200, regardless of how many individual paychecks are affected.
- ORCP 32 I’s cure mechanism can potentially be a useful pretrial tool—but the notice must be complete. The trial court here required Blakeslee to supplement its first notice before accepting the cure; a rushed or incomplete notice may cost time even where the underlying legal position is sound.
Ogletree Deakins’ Portland (OR) office and Wage and Hour Practice Group will continue to monitor Oregon wage-and-hour developments, including whether Winn is taken up for further review, and will provide updates on the Class Action, Oregon, and Wage and Hour blogs as additional information becomes available.
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