Nearly 21,000 current and former Apple employees will be able to bring a class action over claims that the company failed to provide meal and rest breaks required by law, after a California state court gave the go-ahead on Monday night.

Judge Ronald Prager granted class certification for a group of workers at the firm’s corporate headquarters.

The lawsuit was originally filed by a group of four former Apple retail staff who claim that managers routinely made them work more than five hours without a break.

They were then withheld wages that had been promised to make up for the extra time worked.

Plaintiffs’ counsel Tyler Belong said: “Very often workers were not given meal breaks for seven or eight hours and sometimes not at all.”

Rest breaks are mandated by California labour laws and the plaintiffs say that because they had to clock in and out of work there is evidence to back their claims.

Under California law, employers must provide 30-minute lunch breaks within an employee’s first five hours’ work each day and a 10-minute rest break every subsequent four hours.

Judge Prager said the evidence showed Apple had failed to authorise these second rest breaks.

He noted that Apple adopted a new policy in August 2012 to comply with the law — but only nine months after the lawsuit was filed.

The case covers violations that allegedly occurred between December 2007 to August 2012.

Legal experts say the case could generate payouts running into tens of millions of dollars.