California employment case index

Taking the walls off harassment law raises a harder question than the one it answers: if the conduct need not happen at work, what still has to connect it to this plaintiff? California answers with a nexus requirement, and the authorities disagree less than practitioners think. Fisher spoke of presence; Beyda read Fisher as requiring a nexus and held that awareness suffices; Carranza let a $4 million verdict stand on a photograph the plaintiff never saw circulate; and Kruitbosch held that where the harasser’s conduct is not work related, the employer’s response to the complaint can create a hostile environment all by itself. This is the companion to our analysis of the Okonowsky locus rule.

An LAPD captain never witnessed officers passing around a fake nude photo of her and was never confronted to her face — yet the Second District affirmed a $4 million FEHA verdict, holding that her secondhand knowledge of the department-wide circulation, and the LAPD’s refusal to stop it, supplied substantial evidence of a severe or pervasive hostile work environment. A leading application of Government Code section 12923.

Reversing summary judgment for United Airlines, the Court of Appeal held that whether three male employees with comparable social-media accounts were "similarly situated" comparators was a question for the jury, applied the continuing violation doctrine and section 12923's low bar to the harassment claim, and found a two-week complaint-to-termination gap sufficient for retaliation causation.

Harassment no longer happens in a place. A private Instagram account about a specific prison, a group chat, a warehouse saturated with misogynistic music — the dominant fact pattern in harassment intake now begins outside the premises. Okonowsky v. Garland rejects the notion that only conduct inside the physical workplace can be actionable and substitutes a test of effect plus employer response; Sharp v. S&S Activewear disposes of the targeting and equal-opportunity-harasser objections. This analysis sets out what the Ninth Circuit actually held, what it conspicuously did not, and why FEHA reaches the same question through a different instrument.

Government Code section 12923 is the most consequential development in California harassment law in twenty years, and it is routinely read for more than it says. It declares that a single incident of harassing conduct is sufficient to create a triable issue, that harassment cases are rarely appropriate for summary judgment, and that one Ninth Circuit decision may not be used as a severity yardstick. What it does not do is repeal the severe-or-pervasive element or amend the operative prohibition. This analysis reads the section subdivision by subdivision against the federal case law it addresses, and sets out precisely what survives.

The Fourth District affirmed a whistleblower-retaliation verdict for an Office on Aging director fired after warning that a County reorganization was unlawful — holding the County waived its exhaustion defense by first raising it after trial — while reversing her sexual-harassment claim under the pre-§ 12923 "severe or pervasive" standard and affirming a remittitur-backed new trial order on damages.

The failure-to-prevent claim is pleaded in nearly every FEHA complaint and is the one FEHA claim that cannot stand alone. Government Code section 12940, subdivision (k) states the employer's preventive duty without any predicate condition, yet since Trujillo v. North County Transit Dist. the private claim has been derivative: a jury that finds no actionable discrimination, harassment or retaliation leaves nothing for the claim to rest on, and after Dickson v. Burke Williams harassing conduct that is not severe or pervasive will not serve. This analysis traces how the predicate rule was built, marks where it stops — it limits the private right of action rather than agency enforcement, it leaves the individual-defendant question open, and it survives section 12923 untouched — and sets out the symmetry practitioners miss most often: the same statutory duty whose breach grounds the plaintiff's claim supplies the first element of the employer's avoidable-consequences defence.

Age discrimination in violation of the FEHA supports a common-law claim for wrongful discharge in violation of public policy. When a plaintiff relies on a statutory prohibition to support such a claim, the common-law claim is subject to the statute’s substantive limits (the nature and scope of the prohibition) but not…

Nine days after Fatmeh Badih told her employer — a physician with fewer than five employees — that she was pregnant, her last day was set; the DFEH would not even accept her complaint because the office was too small for the FEHA. Division One of the First District affirmed her wrongful-discharge verdict anyway, holding that pregnancy discrimination is a form of sex discrimination under article I, section 8 of the California Constitution, whose fundamental public policy against sex discrimination in employment binds every employer regardless of size. Jennings v. Marralle was distinguished, not disturbed: age has no constitutional anchor, but sex — and therefore pregnancy — does. Badih remains the pleading answer for pregnancy discharges at California's smallest workplaces.

General Dynamics Corp. v. Superior CourtIn-house counsel may sue for wrongful termination — both on an implied-in-fact contract theory and, within limits, a Tameny public-policy theory — even though a client may generally discharge its lawyer at will.General Dynamics Corp. v. Superior Court (1994) 7 Cal.4th 1164Parallel citations: 876 P.2d 487; 32 Cal.Rptr.2d 1. Supreme […]

The discharge stated an actionable Tameny claim and was not preempted by the workers’-compensation law (id. at p. 1085). More durably, the court held that the public policy underpinning a Tameny claim must be “tethered to” specific constitutional or statutory provisions, not merely the court’s own notions of sound…