California employment case index

A PAGA plaintiff proved Labor Code violations but recovered about one percent of the $56 million maximum he calculated, and his attorney fees were cut by a 0.70 negative multiplier. The Fourth District affirms: section 2699(e)(2) mandates no method for reducing penalties — per-employee is fine — and the trial court adequately justified the fee multiplier, leaving the “heightened scrutiny” question for the Supreme Court.

After Turrieta v. Lyft disapproved Moniz II by name, the objector in the long-running Adecco PAGA settlement tried a new key for the same lock: she was asserting her own personal interests — a penalty share, fees, a service award — not the state’s. Division Four dismissed her appeals. Every interest she claimed arises from PAGA itself and is derivative of the state’s; relabeling it personal is a semantic exercise that would leave Turrieta’s holding with no effect. The first published application of Turrieta makes overlapping-settlement fights a before-judgment affair: object in the approving court, police preclusion scope under LaCour — but intervention, vacatur, and appeal are closed.

Two Highland Hospital workers sued the public hospital authority running Alameda County’s medical facilities for meal-and-rest violations, unpaid wages, and PAGA penalties. A unanimous Supreme Court ended the case at the definitions: Labor Code section 18’s “person” — the term that controls who is an “employer” under the wage order and who can be penalized under PAGA — affirmatively excludes public entities. Absent express words bringing the government in, break rules and PAGA penalties stop at the public-sector line. The court disapproved Sargent’s contrary rule for statutes carrying their own penalties, declined to decide whether Government Code section 818 independently bars such penalties, and reserved the effect of the 2024 PAGA reform.

Three Lyft drivers filed overlapping PAGA actions; when one settled, the other two moved to intervene, objected, and moved to vacate the judgment — invoking their status as deputized proxies of the state. A divided Supreme Court held a PAGA plaintiff’s deputization confers no such rights: the statute delegates the power to commence and prosecute one’s own action, and it entrusts settlement oversight to the LWDA and the approving court. Moniz v. Adecco is disapproved. What remains for rival plaintiffs is coordination, informal input to the approving court, and advocacy to the LWDA — plus the open questions the court expressly reserved, including the state’s own rights and personal-interest intervention.

Marshalls bought a sweeping PAGA release in a federal settlement whose plaintiff had noticed only one theory to the LWDA — off-the-clock time in end-of-shift bag checks. When Robert LaCour later sued over expense reimbursement and other never-noticed violations, the trial court struck his claims as precluded. Division Four reversed: a PAGA judgment’s preclusive reach is measured by the claims the settling plaintiff pleaded or was authorized by her LWDA notice to plead, not by the words of her release, and an unauthorized proxy is in privity with no one. The court also upheld pandemic Emergency Rule 9, and it reserved issue preclusion while barring any double recovery.

Kindercare’s arbitration agreement contained a “poison pill”: a clause providing that the whole agreement is invalid if its class/representative-action waiver is unenforceable. Because a wholesale predispute waiver of representative PAGA claims cannot be enforced after Iskanian and Viking River, the Court of Appeal held the poison pill voided the entire agreement — sending every claim, including the employee’s individual claims, to court. Had Kindercare omitted the poison pill, Viking River would have let it compel the individual claims; its own drafting foreclosed that path. The drafter was held to the all-or-nothing clause it wrote.

The unpaid-wages component of section 558 is not a civil penalty recoverable through PAGA; only the fixed civil penalties ($50/$100 per employee per pay period) are PAGA penalties. Because the unpaid wages are not part of the PAGA claim, the trial court could not compel that portion to arbitration as if it were.

A PAGA plaintiff is presumptively entitled to discover the identities and contact information of other aggrieved employees statewide, subject to the employees’ privacy interests (which may be protected through a Belaire-West opt-out notice) rather than to a heightened threshold showing of merit before discovery.

In Bareno v. San Diego Community College District (2017) 7 Cal.App.5th 546, the Fourth District reversed summary judgment for the employer on a CFRA retaliation claim, holding that the 30-day advance-notice rule does not apply when the need for medical leave is unforeseeable — notice need only be given “as soon as practicable” — and that whether an employee sufficiently requested leave and supplied adequate certification is a question of fact. The employer’s decision to treat the employee’s medical absences as a “voluntary resignation,” coming virtually immediately after she sought leave, raised triable issues of retaliatory causation.

An employee who cannot work under a particular supervisor because of anxiety and stress tied to that supervisor’s ordinary oversight has no disability under FEHA. In Higgins-Williams, the Third District affirmed summary judgment for Sutter on that single ground, which dissolved the plaintiff’s discrimination, accommodation, retaliation, and wrongful-termination claims, while remanding only the cost award under Williams v. Chino Valley.

The arbitrator’s award was upheld. Under the narrow standard of review governing arbitration awards, the court declined to decide whether the “honest belief” defense applies to CFRA claims; even assuming the arbitrator erred in invoking it, the error did not deprive the employee of an unwaivable statutory right, so…

In Olofsson v. Mission Linen Supply (2012) 211 Cal.App.4th 1236, the First District held that an employer’s regulatory duty to respond to a CFRA leave request within ten calendar days is not a duty to grant or deny it within that window. Affirming a defense judgment, the court ruled substantial evidence supported findings that the employer neither misrepresented that a route driver’s family leave was approved nor stayed silent when it had a duty to speak, even though it disclosed his ineligibility — 175 to 176 hours short of the 1,250-hour threshold — only the day before he left to care for his mother.

The First District reversed a defense verdict for instructional error, holding a whistleblower's motive irrelevant and reasonable-belief reports of unlawful policies protected even where debatable — but its further rule that reporting “publicly known” information is not a disclosure was later rejected by the Supreme Court in Kolla's, and the article maps what survives.

The Court of Appeal reversed a $356,000 CFRA judgment, holding that the right to reinstatement to the same or a comparable position expires at the end of the 12-week protected leave — so an employee who returned after 19 weeks had no interference claim — and that her retaliation claim failed for lack of evidence rebutting the County’s reorganization rationale.

Two unions took assignments from more than 150 transportation workers and sued their employers under the UCL and PAGA for meal- and rest-break violations. The Supreme Court unanimously shut the door: after Proposition 64, an assignment cannot confer UCL standing on an uninjured assignee, and a PAGA claim cannot be assigned at all — the act creates no property right, so the aggrieved employee, suing as the state’s proxy, ‘does not own an assignable interest.’ Associational standing does not fill the gap, and representative UCL claims must proceed as class actions per the same-day companion, Arias. The state-proxy architecture announced here is the foundation Iskanian, Kim v. Reins, Adolph, and Turrieta all build on — and the 2024 reform kept its line intact.

An employee fired under a no-fault attendance policy after a pancreatitis hospitalization sued under FEHA, CFRA, and Tameny. The Court of Appeal affirmed summary judgment on the FEHA disability claims — telling the employer he was “sick” or hospitalized did not give notice of a disability — but reversed on CFRA and the related Tameny claim, holding that while “calling in sick” alone is insufficient CFRA notice, hospital records showing inpatient care can constitute a request for CFRA-qualifying leave, shifting to the employer the burden to inquire and designate, and that causation does not require the decision-maker to know the absences were protected.

The California Supreme Court held that a CFRA employee’s simultaneous performance of a similar part-time job for another employer is strong but not conclusive evidence that she could perform the functions of her own full-time position. Because the phrase “functions of the position of that employee” means the job this employer assigned — not job functions “generally” — whether Lonicki had a serious health condition disabling her from her Sutter job remained a triable issue, and summary judgment was reversed. The Court separately held that an employer’s failure to invoke the second- and third-opinion dispute-resolution procedure does not estop it from litigating the medical merits.

Reversing summary judgment, the Court of Appeal held that an employee need not mention the CFRA to request protected medical leave — and that an employer that never gave notice of CFRA rights, rejected a chiropractor's certification out of hand, and refused to communicate with the employee's designated representatives could not defeat his interference, retaliation, disability discrimination, and wrongful termination claims as a matter of law.

In Pang v. Beverly Hospital, Inc. (2000) 79 Cal.App.4th 986, the Court of Appeal drew the first California line around what it means to take family leave “to care for” a parent. A physical therapist fired after flying to New York to help her independent, 81-year-old mother pack and relocate to a one-level apartment was held not to be “caring for” her mother under the Family Rights Act: her participation had to be “warranted” during “a period of the treatment or supervision” of her mother, and packing boxes and directing movers was not. Affirming judgment on the pleadings, the court confirmed that courts — not the agency — bear ultimate responsibility for construing CalFRA.