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.”

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.

Inglewood’s elected city treasurer accused the mayor of misappropriating public funds, then saw her monthly salary cut from $8,000 to $1,404 and her duties stripped away. Her whistleblower retaliation suit under Labor Code section 1102.5 failed at the threshold: a unanimous Supreme Court held that elected officials are not “employees” within section 1106’s definition. Finding the statutory text inconclusive, the court rested on legislative history and context — section 1106 protects rank-and-file public workers, not officials who answer to the electorate — while noting that other remedies, including the First Amendment, may remain available.

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.

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.

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.

The employee bears the burden of proving he or she is a qualified individual under the FEHA — that is, able to perform the essential duties of the position with or without reasonable accommodation — just as the federal ADA requires; it is not the employer’s burden to disprove qualification.

The FEHA requires only that a physiological disease or condition affecting a body system “limit” — not “substantially limit” — the plaintiff’s ability to participate in a major life activity, a standard broader than the federal ADA; the later Poppink Act merely clarified, and did not change, that existing “limits”…