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.”

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.

Tilly’s required retail workers to phone the store exactly two hours before every on-call shift — under threat of written discipline — and paid nothing if the answer was ‘don’t come in.’ Division Three held, 2–1, that this triggers Wage Order 7 reporting-time pay: ‘reporting for work’ means presenting oneself as ordered, and the employer’s own directions define the manner, whether that is walking through the door, logging on remotely, or making a mandatory call. The holding is deliberately tied to the two-hour call-in regime, the retroactivity question was expressly left open, and Justice Egerton’s partial dissent — built on 18,000 pages of IWC history — supplies the employer playbook. Review was denied; Ward remains the leading California authority on call-in scheduling.

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.