California employment case index

Ask what California law says about rounding employees' time punches and the honest answer is that nobody knows. One Court of Appeal decision approved the practice in 2012, borrowing its standard from a federal regulation; it has never been overruled and still binds trial courts. But the Supreme Court has twice declined to adopt it, saying in Donohue that it "has never decided the validity of the rounding standard articulated in See's Candy I" — and then deciding that case on an assumption rather than an endorsement. Two Courts of Appeal have since rejected rounding where the employer captured exact minutes and underpaid anyway, and the Supreme Court granted review in both. The result is a genuine vacuum: the binding authority is the weakest, the strongest reasoning cannot bind, and the question sits with the Supreme Court in S277518. This piece sets out precisely what has been decided, what has not, and what to do in the meantime.

There is no California statute or case law authorizing or prohibiting employee time rounding, so Division One borrowed the federal rule: an employer may round punch times to the nearest tenth of an hour if the policy is fair and neutral on its face and, as applied, does not fail over time to compensate employees for the time they actually worked. The posture is narrow – a writ vacating summary adjudication on two of the employer's affirmative defenses, with the court expressly leaving open whether either side will prevail. The plaintiff's expert lost the case by treating the employer's separate grace-period policy as if it were rounding. Whether neutral rounding survives at all is now pending before the California Supreme Court in Camp v. Home Depot, S277518.

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.

Fired the day she returned from pregnancy-related bed rest, a caregiver defeated summary judgment with declarations from four coworkers describing pregnancy-triggered firings by the same supervisors — evidence the court held admissible as a matter of law to prove motive, not propensity.

FEHA never names leave as a reasonable accommodation, yet leave is the most common accommodation dispute in practice. Two published decisions supply both halves of the rule: Hanson v. Lucky Stores holds that a finite leave can be a reasonable accommodation where the employee is likely to be able to work at the end of it, and that an employer need not wait indefinitely; Jensen v. Wells Fargo Bank fixes what an employer must establish to end such a case on summary judgment. This analysis states the rule, the proviso, the indefiniteness limit and the duty to reassign, and corrects the subdivision lettering that briefs still get wrong.

When Lillian Garland returned from pregnancy disability leave to find her receptionist job filled, California’s guarantee of leave and reinstatement collided with her employer’s theory that Title VII forbade treating pregnancy “better” than other disabilities. The Supreme Court sided with California: the Pregnancy Discrimination Act is a floor beneath which pregnancy benefits may not drop, not a ceiling above which states may not rise — and employers can always comply with both laws by leveling benefits up. Guerra remains the constitutional foundation of the PDLL and of every California pregnancy protection built since.