California employment case index

Six BART employees who objected on religious grounds to the agency's COVID-19 vaccine mandate were told they could not be accommodated, lost their jobs, tried the case, and won $7,824,580. The Ninth Circuit affirmed, and in doing so gave the employer's undue-hardship defence a shape it had not previously had in a tried case: it is not enough to prove that vaccination was the most effective available measure, because an employer must show the alternatives were "not only less safe, but less safe by a 'substantial,' 'excessive,' or 'unjustifiable' margin." Reliance on public-health guidance is permissible but not dispositive — and here the guidance BART said it relied on was never put in the record, leaving the agency with two retained experts the jury was free to discount. The panel read its own recent vaccine-mandate decisions, Petersen v. Snohomish Regional Fire & Rescue and Williams v. Legacy Health, as resting on their records rather than on the mandate itself: a transit agency staffing a utility worker, a ticket clerk behind bullet-proof glass and a technician who worked ninety percent alone is not a fire department or a hospital. Most consequentially for practitioners, the court held that undue hardship is a fact-specific inquiry ordinarily reserved to the jury, resolvable as a matter of law only where the burden is so obvious that reasonable minds could not differ. Front pay to one plaintiff who had elected it below was not plain error. The conditional cross-appeal on free exercise was mooted and not reached — though the author of the opinion wrote separately, at length, to say the district court's analysis of it was wrong.

The Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act of 2021 reaches only a “dispute or claim that arises or accrues on or after” March 3, 2022 — and in Combs v. Netflix the Ninth Circuit decided, for the first time in the circuit, what each of those words means. A claim accrues when the plaintiff has a complete and present cause of action; a dispute arises, in the employment setting, when an employee registers disagreement with the employer — internally, externally or otherwise — and the employer expressly or constructively opposes that position. The panel rejected both extremes: a dispute need not await a formal agency or court filing, but neither does it arise merely because the harassment happened. On Jessica Combs's own allegations — years of internal complaints that Netflix ignored, and a firing in December 2021 — both triggers fell before the cut-off, the EFAA did not apply, and her arbitration agreement was enforced. The decision is the gateway authority for every EFAA fight in the circuit, and it cuts in both directions.

The California Supreme Court granted review on March 25, 2026 in Barbosa v. Sierra Pacific Orthopaedic Center Medical Group to decide whether an arbitration agreement that designates the Federal Arbitration Act thereby imports the FAA's substantive provisions and their preemptive force, even where no interstate commerce is shown. The underlying Court of Appeal opinion is nonpublished, and the Court denied the requests to publish it on granting review. The paired grant-and-hold, Tuufuli v. West Coast Dental Administrative Services, is published but itself under review, and answered the question yes. This pending-review analysis sets out the Court's own issue statement, the competing answers below with their correct citability under rule 8.1115(e)(1), and what the answer decides for Armendariz, Labor Code section 432.6, the arbitration-fee statutes and the EFAA.

Raines v. U.S. Healthworks Medical Group Business-Entity Agents Can Be Directly Liable Under FEHA Raines v. U.S. Healthworks Medical Group (2023) 15 Cal.5th 268 Parallel citations: 534 P.3d 40; 312 Cal.Rptr.3d 301. Supreme Court of California. Opinion filed August 21, 2023. Docket No. S273630. On a question certified by the United States Court of Appeals […]

California religious-accommodation litigation runs on two tracks that are routinely confused, and Groff v. DeJoy answers only one of them. Groff told the lower courts that the de minimis gloss they had drawn from a single line of Hardison does not establish undue hardship, and that an employer must instead show substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of its particular business — while expressly declining to adopt the ADA's "significant difficulty or expense" standard, which is the very phrase Government Code section 12926, subdivision (u) has long used to define undue hardship under FEHA. This analysis sets the two texts side by side, states precisely what Groff did and did not do to Hardison, traces the collective-bargaining limit through Soldinger, and then marks the point at which none of it matters: where the ministerial exception applies, it is an affirmative defence that removes the claim rather than a weight in the hardship calculus.

Government Code section 12940, subdivision (n) makes it unlawful to fail to engage in a timely, good faith interactive process, and an employee may sue on that practice alone. The received wisdom that California courts are split on whether such a plaintiff must also prove an available accommodation has not been accurate since 2009. This analysis traces the rule from Claudio through Wysinger, Nadaf-Rahrov and Scotch to Shirvanyan, isolates the two words that carry the element, and sets out exactly what must be proved, by whom, and as of when.

FEHA defines both mental and physical disability to include being regarded or treated by the employer as having a condition that makes achievement of a major life activity difficult, and the Legislature enacted those paragraphs by number, expressly notwithstanding Cassista. Gelfo held that the only question under the prong is what the employer believed — no actual disability, no mistake, no myths-or-stereotypes showing — and, breaking with the federal authority then controlling in the Eighth and Ninth Circuits, that a perceived-disability plaintiff is owed reasonable accommodation and the interactive process. Wallace removed animosity from the elements and refused to let an honest mistake count as a legitimate reason; Soria extended the prong to conditions that are merely potentially disabling. What the prong does not do is lower the definitional floor, which is where Higgins-Williams sits — and, as this analysis shows, where the real contest now is.

FEHA never names leave as a reasonable accommodation, yet leave is the most common accommodation dispute in practice. Two published decisions supply both halves of the rule: Hanson v. Lucky Stores holds that a finite leave can be a reasonable accommodation where the employee is likely to be able to work at the end of it, and that an employer need not wait indefinitely; Jensen v. Wells Fargo Bank fixes what an employer must establish to end such a case on summary judgment. This analysis states the rule, the proviso, the indefiniteness limit and the duty to reassign, and corrects the subdivision lettering that briefs still get wrong.

A plaintiff asserting a state constitutional privacy claim must establish (1) a legally protected privacy interest, (2) a reasonable expectation of privacy under the circumstances, and (3) conduct constituting a serious invasion of privacy; the defendant may then prevail by showing legitimate, countervailing…

A 305-pound applicant rejected by a Santa Cruz health food collective sued under the FEHA, alleging she was regarded as physically handicapped because of her weight. The California Supreme Court held that weight may qualify as a protected disability only where medical evidence shows it results from a physiological condition affecting a basic bodily system and limits a major life activity, and that this plaintiff – who maintained she was healthy and fit – had proved no such thing. Government Code section 12926.1 now names the case and disclaims several of its interpretations.