California employment case index

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.

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.