California employment case index

A former SpaceX employee who lived and worked in Redmond, Washington filed a FEHA complaint in California, and SpaceX refused to answer the Civil Rights Department's investigatory subpoena on the ground that FEHA stops at the state line. The Second District affirmed the order compelling compliance, and in the published portion of its opinion it did two things that matter to every multistate employer and every remote worker. It separated the question of what California connections trigger FEHA's investigatory provisions from the question of what connections trigger its substantive ones, observing that the potential for conflict with other sovereigns is far less when the Department investigates than when it enjoins, so that it is at least conceivable that fewer connections are required to open an investigation than to impose liability. And it refused to read Kearney, or the Tidewater-Sullivan-Ward-Oman wage-and-hour line, as laying down any categorical rule that California's employment laws never protect a worker outside the state, leaving Campbell v. Arco Marine intact but confined to a record in which the California connections were already settled. The court did not hold that FEHA reaches this employee; it held that SpaceX had not shown it cannot. Note that the opinion is published except as to part 2 of the Discussion, which may not be cited.

Lauren Brown filed the fifth of five overlapping PAGA actions against the same restaurant operator. While her case sat stayed, the employer settled globally with an earlier plaintiff, and the trial court then granted judgment on the pleadings. Division Eight affirmed. The only contested question it reached was whether the settling plaintiff's failure to wait the full 65 days after her amended agency notice destroyed the settlement's preclusive effect – and the court held it did not, because nothing extends the waiting period to amended notices and the agency itself had accepted the settlement. Brown also lacked standing for violations postdating her 2018 separation.

California's fee-default statutes have become the most-used route out of employer-drafted arbitration, and in August 2025 the Supreme Court rewrote how they work. Code of Civil Procedure sections 1281.97 and 1281.98 still declare that a drafting party who pays the arbitrator more than 30 days late is in material breach, in default, and has waived its right to compel arbitration. But in Hohenshelt v. Superior Court the court held, 5-2, that this scheme survives FAA preemption only on a construction that leaves intact the background relief-from-forfeiture provisions — Code of Civil Procedure section 473, subdivision (b) and Civil Code sections 3275 and 1511 — so that the loss of the arbitral forum follows only from nonpayment that was willful, grossly negligent, or fraudulent. Mandatory monetary sanctions under section 1281.99, subdivision (a) still follow automatically. This synthesis sets out the operative statutory text and credit lines, traces the eleven Court of Appeal decisions the Supreme Court disapproved, states the post-Hohenshelt rule as a four-step sequence, shows how the first published application (Wilson v. Tap Worldwide) deployed it as an as-applied preemption argument, and identifies what remains open — including whether the same construction governs section 1281.97.

The Sixth District affirmed summary judgment for the City, holding that a five-year pattern of stripping a female employee's coveted technical duties was "a collection of isolated employment decisions" that had acquired permanence by 1996 under Richards v. CH2M Hill — and that a biased supervisor's sexist remarks could not show pretext where he neither knew of her candidacy nor took part in the challenged hiring.

A worker fired nine months into his vacation year was denied every day of accrued vacation pay because his employer's policy made eligibility turn on still being employed on his anniversary date – a rule it had applied to roughly 300 departing employees. A unanimous Supreme Court held the policy could not defeat the right. Vacation pay is not a gratuity but deferred wages earned by the year's labor, so a proportionate right to it vests as the work is performed, exactly as pension rights vest on acceptance of employment. An anniversary requirement is at most a condition subsequent, and Labor Code section 227.3 forbids an employer policy from turning that condition into a forfeiture of what has already been earned.