California employment case index

A terminated Blue Origin executive opposed arbitration of his FEHA and related claims. The Court of Appeal affirmed the denial of arbitration on unconscionability grounds — expressly declining to reach the federal EFAA — holding the adhesive agreement substantively unconscionable in at least four ways: overbreadth, lack of mutuality, a predispute jury-trial waiver, and a representative/PAGA waiver. Applying Ramirez v. Charter Communications, the court refused to sever, because curing the overbreadth and non-mutuality would require impermissible reformation and would reward one-sided drafting; severance “would not further the interests of justice.”

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.

For two decades employers have split a single hiring bargain across two pieces of paper: a clean, mutual arbitration agreement, and a separate confidentiality or non-competition agreement that quietly routes the employer's own claims to court. Beginning with Alberto v. Cambrian Homecare in 2023, the Court of Appeal built an answer out of Civil Code section 1642 – documents executed as parts of substantially one transaction are read together, so unconscionability in the companion document is unconscionability in the agreement to arbitrate. In February 2026 the California Supreme Court endorsed that approach in Fuentes v. Empire Nissan, Inc., and added the correction that matters most in practice: a court may not resolve the resulting ambiguity by invoking a policy favouring arbitration. This article states the rule the Alberto-Silva-Gurganus-Cluck line and Fuentes together now supply, and the limits of each.

Charter’s mandatory arbitration agreement directed employees’ claims into arbitration while carving out the claims Charter itself would bring, compressed FEHA filing to the one-year administrative window, and made anyone who unsuccessfully resisted arbitration pay the fees incurred to compel it. The Supreme Court held all three terms substantively unconscionable — but validated the four-deposition discovery cap, disapproving the line of cases that judged discovery limits by a particular plaintiff’s later needs. On remedy, the court rejected clause-counting: severance is a qualitative, totality inquiry under Armendariz, and the refusal to enforce was reversed and remanded for that analysis.

USC required a staff employee to sign an arbitration agreement reaching ‘all claims, whether or not arising out of’ her employment, against USC and a broad web of affiliated persons, surviving her employment indefinitely and revocable only by the university president. The Court of Appeal affirmed the denial of arbitration: the agreement was substantively unconscionable for three independent reasons — overbroad scope, infinite duration, and lack of mutuality — and the trial court reasonably refused to sever, because curing it would require rewriting the plain language and would hand USC a windfall. Unconscionability is judged at the time of contracting, so the employer could not save the agreement by noting the plaintiff’s actual claims were employment-related.

The Ninth Circuit held the Federal Arbitration Act preempts AB 51 (Labor Code § 432.6), California's attempt to ban mandatory employment arbitration, because a state rule that burdens the formation of arbitration agreements stands as an obstacle to the FAA.

Fired the day she returned from pregnancy-related bed rest, a caregiver defeated summary judgment with declarations from four coworkers describing pregnancy-triggered firings by the same supervisors — evidence the court held admissible as a matter of law to prove motive, not propensity.

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.

When Lillian Garland returned from pregnancy disability leave to find her receptionist job filled, California’s guarantee of leave and reinstatement collided with her employer’s theory that Title VII forbade treating pregnancy “better” than other disabilities. The Supreme Court sided with California: the Pregnancy Discrimination Act is a floor beneath which pregnancy benefits may not drop, not a ceiling above which states may not rise — and employers can always comply with both laws by leveling benefits up. Guerra remains the constitutional foundation of the PDLL and of every California pregnancy protection built since.