California employment case index

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.

A solar-project electrician queued unpaid at a security gate while guards inspected vehicles, drove miles of access road under strict site rules, and ate lunch confined to a designated area under a CBA calling meal periods “unpaid.” Answering the Ninth Circuit, a unanimous Supreme Court held the exit procedure is compensable “hours worked”; the gate-to-lot drive is compensable only as “employer-mandated travel,” and only if the gate is the first location required for a reason beyond site access; and no collective bargaining agreement can waive the minimum wage for a meal period during which the employer’s confinement forecloses otherwise feasible personal activities.

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.

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…