California employment case index

Tameny v. Atlantic Richfield Co. (1980) 27 Cal.3d 167 created California’s public-policy wrongful-discharge tort: an employee fired for refusing to commit an illegal act may sue in tort, recovering tort and punitive damages, not just contract remedies.

A firm filed a wage-and-hour class action duplicating one it had already filed elsewhere, then opposed a stay with a brief — drafted by a contract attorney using generative AI — full of nonexistent citations and at least eight fabricated quotations. The First District affirms $6,000 in section 128.7 sanctions: counsel of record bear ultimate responsibility for what they sign, and the duty to verify authority cannot be delegated to any form of technology.

Intuitive Surgical defended a harassment suit by pointing to the adequacy of its attorney-led investigation, then tried to withhold the investigator’s findings as work product. The Sixth District grants the employee a writ: putting the investigation’s adequacy at issue waives privilege and even core work product over the investigator’s factual findings and anything bearing on the investigation’s scope and adequacy.

A terminated COO forwarded her employer’s e-mails — some attorney-client privileged — to her personal account and handed them to her lawyers for her wrongful-termination and harassment cross-claims. The Fourth District holds the State Fund rule on handling privileged materials applies even to such intentional, unauthorized disclosures, and reverses the denial of the employer’s motion to disqualify counsel.

Two Chico State physics professors sued the CSU Trustees for retaliation, alleging a sham investigation and sabotage of their move to a new university after they reported harassment. The Trustees moved to strike the claims under the anti-SLAPP statute as “based in part” on protected speech. The Third District affirms denial: a movant must analyze each claim element-by-element and identify which acts are protected — “based in part” is not enough.

Cambodian villagers forced to work at Thai seafood factories sued a U.S. marketer under the trafficking civil-remedy statute; their case was dismissed because the statute then reached only those who succeeded in benefiting, not those who attempted to. After Congress amended the law, the en banc Ninth Circuit holds the clarifying amendment retroactive — and that Landgraf governs all such amendments, overruling the “clarifying amendment” exception — reviving the claims.

A resident manager whose apartment came with the job refused to leave after she was terminated. The Appellate Division affirms an unlawful detainer judgment: housing provided as part of employment compensation is not a protected tenancy, the former manager became a tenant at sufferance or licensee outside the Tenant Protection Act, and her retaliatory-eviction defense failed for lack of evidence.

A fire-department mechanic repeatedly confronted management and then alluded to an incident in which a firefighter fatally shot another firefighter. The Second District affirms a three-year workplace violence restraining order under section 527.8: the veiled reference was a credible, implied threat outside the First Amendment, and the order’s firearm restriction survives Second Amendment review under Rahimi.

A partially published Court of Appeal decision on defamation and compelled self-publication in the termination context — an issue now pending before the California Supreme Court.

In Wassmann v. South Orange County Community College Dist. (2018) 24 Cal.App.5th 825, the Court of Appeal affirmed summary judgment against a dismissed community-college librarian, holding her FEHA discrimination and harassment claims time-barred. Applying the three-part continuing-violation test from Richards v. CH2M Hill, the court held the doctrine could not save the claims because the pre- and post-limitations acts were “not at all similar” and the employer’s conduct “acquired a degree of permanence” when her employment was terminated — and post-dismissal acts of a neutral administrative law judge could not be imputed to the employer.

In Kim v. Konad USA Distribution, Inc. (2014) 226 Cal.App.4th 1336, the Court of Appeal affirmed a $60,000 bench-trial judgment for a sexually harassed employee, holding that FEHA’s administrative-exhaustion requirement is “jurisdictional” only in the loose, prudential sense and does not affect the trial court’s fundamental subject matter jurisdiction. Because the defendants waited until after the case was submitted to assert non-exhaustion, they forfeited the defense; and because exhaustion is not truly jurisdictional, the court could consider post-trial materials confirming the plaintiff had in fact exhausted. The court also held a harassment claim lies against an employer of any size.

A maintenance technician paid $10 an hour and never reimbursed for the heavy work mileage he was ordered to drive in his own truck could state a claim for constructive discharge in violation of public policy, where the unreimbursed expense pushed his effective pay below the minimum wage; whether conditions were intolerable was normally a jury question, so the demurrer should not have been sustained. The IIED count, however, was barred by workers' compensation exclusivity.

In Acuna v. San Diego Gas & Electric Co. (2013) 217 Cal.App.4th 1402, reviewing a sustained demurrer, the Court of Appeal held the plaintiff’s FEHA disability- and race-discrimination claims time-barred but reversed on her retaliation and wrongful-termination claims, holding that the section 12960 clock for a discharge runs from the actual termination — not from when the retaliatory motive arose — and that the employer, which controlled the termination date, controlled the accrual trigger. On the accommodation claims, continuing-violation tolling ended once the employer’s refusal reached a degree of permanence.

Summary judgment was improperly granted on the harassment and retaliation claims because triable issues of fact existed; the decision is notable for its strong criticism of the overuse and abuse of summary judgment in employment cases, for its treatment of the parties’ voluminous (and often meritless) evidentiary…

Reversing summary judgment, the Second District held that a lesbian mail-services employee raised triable issues on whether her FEHA administrative complaint was timely under the continuing-violation doctrine, even though her harasser stopped his explicit sexual-orientation slurs over a year before she filed. Applying Richards v. CH2M Hill, the court held the harasser's later, facially neutral work-sabotage campaign could be “similar in kind” to the slurs and that “permanence” turns on when the harassment stops, the employee resigns, or protest becomes futile — not on when the offensive words cease.

Miklosy v. Regents of University of CaliforniaThe Whistleblower Protection Act bars a damages action against the University once it timely decides an internal retaliation complaint; a Tameny tort does not lie against a public entity or against a supervisor; and workers’ compensation exclusivity bars the related emotional-distress claim.Miklosy v. Regents of University of California (2008) […]

A unanimous Supreme Court holds that a signed offer letter stating employment is "at will" and terminable "at any time" is unambiguous — recruitment talk of a "long-term fix" cannot create an implied for-cause contract or support fraud reliance — with Justice Baxter (joined by Corrigan) urging reconsideration of Pacific Gas and Justice Moreno reserving "upon notice" clauses.

The continuing-violation doctrine applies to FEHA claims: an employer’s related unlawful acts are treated as a single continuing violation — and the limitations period does not begin to run — so long as the conduct is sufficiently similar and frequent and has not yet acquired a degree of permanence that should put the…

A defendant moving for summary judgment bears the burden of showing that a cause of action has no merit — that one or more elements cannot be established or that there is a complete defense — by either conclusively negating an element or showing the plaintiff does not possess, and cannot reasonably obtain, evidence to…

An African-American electronic technician laid off in a budget cut applied for dozens of university jobs, was hired for none, and sued under the FEHA for retaliation. Affirming summary judgment, the Court of Appeal held that a string of rejections by different managers in unrelated departments is a series of isolated decisions, not a “continuing violation” — and that retaliatory remarks by HR staff who took no part in the hiring cannot establish causation, because every actual decisionmaker disclaimed knowledge of the protected grievance.

A steelworker fired months after testifying in a coworker’s asbestos case revived his public-policy and FEHA disability claims: they required no CBA interpretation, his union could not waive his judicial forum, and coworker evidence that the termination-night incident was staged made pretext a jury question.

Good cause to terminate under an implied “good cause” contract means a reasoned, good-faith conclusion that the misconduct occurred, supported by substantial evidence gathered through an adequate investigation that gave the employee notice and a chance to respond — not the jury’s after-the-fact determination of…

Age discrimination in violation of the FEHA supports a common-law claim for wrongful discharge in violation of public policy. When a plaintiff relies on a statutory prohibition to support such a claim, the common-law claim is subject to the statute’s substantive limits (the nature and scope of the prohibition) but not…

In Mullins v. Rockwell International Corp. (1997) 15 Cal.4th 731, a long-tenured manager who resigned after a demotion and a steady erosion of his responsibilities sued for constructive discharge in contract; the trial court and Court of Appeal held his claims time-barred, running the limitations period from the date he learned of the adverse changes. A unanimous Supreme Court reversed. Extending its reasoning in Romano v. Rockwell, the court held that the limitations period for a contract action based on constructive discharge runs from the date of actual termination of employment — the resignation — not from the onset of, or the employee's knowledge of, the intolerable conditions. Because the breach alleged is termination without good cause, and an employee who continues to perform retains an election of remedies, the cause of action accrues only upon resignation. The court disapproved Regents of University of California v. Superior Court to the extent inconsistent.

Nine days after Fatmeh Badih told her employer — a physician with fewer than five employees — that she was pregnant, her last day was set; the DFEH would not even accept her complaint because the office was too small for the FEHA. Division One of the First District affirmed her wrongful-discharge verdict anyway, holding that pregnancy discrimination is a form of sex discrimination under article I, section 8 of the California Constitution, whose fundamental public policy against sex discrimination in employment binds every employer regardless of size. Jennings v. Marralle was distinguished, not disturbed: age has no constitutional anchor, but sex — and therefore pregnancy — does. Badih remains the pleading answer for pregnancy discharges at California's smallest workplaces.

To establish a constructive discharge, an employee must prove that the employer either intentionally created or knowingly permitted working conditions so intolerable or aggravated that a reasonable person in the employee’s position would have had no reasonable alternative but to resign; ordinary job dissatisfaction or…

General Dynamics Corp. v. Superior Court In-house counsel may sue for wrongful termination — both on an implied-in-fact contract theory and, within limits, a Tameny public-policy theory — even though a client may generally discharge its lawyer at will. General Dynamics Corp. v. Superior Court (1994) 7 Cal.4th 1164 Parallel citations: 876 P.2d 487; 32 […]

The discharge stated an actionable Tameny claim and was not preempted by the workers’-compensation law (id. at p. 1085). More durably, the court held that the public policy underpinning a Tameny claim must be “tethered to” specific constitutional or statutory provisions, not merely the court’s own notions of sound…

The FEHA does not displace other state-law remedies, including common-law claims, for employment discrimination; an employee need not exhaust FEHA’s administrative process before pursuing nonstatutory causes of action; and sex discrimination in employment may support a tort claim for wrongful discharge in…

The Tameny claim failed because Foley’s report about a coworker served the employer’s private interest, not a fundamental public policy. Foley nonetheless adequately pleaded an implied-in-fact contract to discharge only for good cause — based on longevity of service, promotions, raises, assurances, and the employer’s…

Yes. The longevity of Pugh’s service, together with the employer’s commendations and assurances and its acknowledged practices, supported an implied-in-fact promise that he would not be discharged except for good cause; the nonsuit was therefore error and the judgment was reversed (id. at p. 330).