California employment case index

Six BART employees who objected on religious grounds to the agency's COVID-19 vaccine mandate were told they could not be accommodated, lost their jobs, tried the case, and won $7,824,580. The Ninth Circuit affirmed, and in doing so gave the employer's undue-hardship defence a shape it had not previously had in a tried case: it is not enough to prove that vaccination was the most effective available measure, because an employer must show the alternatives were "not only less safe, but less safe by a 'substantial,' 'excessive,' or 'unjustifiable' margin." Reliance on public-health guidance is permissible but not dispositive — and here the guidance BART said it relied on was never put in the record, leaving the agency with two retained experts the jury was free to discount. The panel read its own recent vaccine-mandate decisions, Petersen v. Snohomish Regional Fire & Rescue and Williams v. Legacy Health, as resting on their records rather than on the mandate itself: a transit agency staffing a utility worker, a ticket clerk behind bullet-proof glass and a technician who worked ninety percent alone is not a fire department or a hospital. Most consequentially for practitioners, the court held that undue hardship is a fact-specific inquiry ordinarily reserved to the jury, resolvable as a matter of law only where the burden is so obvious that reasonable minds could not differ. Front pay to one plaintiff who had elected it below was not plain error. The conditional cross-appeal on free exercise was mooted and not reached — though the author of the opinion wrote separately, at length, to say the district court's analysis of it was wrong.

A former SpaceX employee who lived and worked in Redmond, Washington filed a FEHA complaint in California, and SpaceX refused to answer the Civil Rights Department's investigatory subpoena on the ground that FEHA stops at the state line. The Second District affirmed the order compelling compliance, and in the published portion of its opinion it did two things that matter to every multistate employer and every remote worker. It separated the question of what California connections trigger FEHA's investigatory provisions from the question of what connections trigger its substantive ones, observing that the potential for conflict with other sovereigns is far less when the Department investigates than when it enjoins, so that it is at least conceivable that fewer connections are required to open an investigation than to impose liability. And it refused to read Kearney, or the Tidewater-Sullivan-Ward-Oman wage-and-hour line, as laying down any categorical rule that California's employment laws never protect a worker outside the state, leaving Campbell v. Arco Marine intact but confined to a record in which the California connections were already settled. The court did not hold that FEHA reaches this employee; it held that SpaceX had not shown it cannot. Note that the opinion is published except as to part 2 of the Discussion, which may not be cited.

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.

The University of California refuses to employ undocumented students who lack federal work authorization. The First District held that the policy facially discriminates based on immigration status under the FEHA national-origin regulations, and that the University’s only justification — fear that the federal government might read IRCA to cover it and prosecute — could not sustain the policy, because the University never attempted the regulation’s clear-and-convincing showing that federal law requires the discrimination. The court issued a writ directing the Regents to reconsider the policy on proper criteria, while pointedly declining to decide whether IRCA applies to state entities at all.

A correctional officer with permanent physical restrictions wanted CDCR to file for industrial disability retirement on her behalf. CDCR instead offered a medical demotion to a personnel specialist position, which she declined after disclosing a new mental health condition that kept her off work entirely. Division Two affirmed summary judgment on all five FEHA counts and held that a PERS disability retirement is not a reasonable accommodation – because it is a separation from employment, while every statutory example of accommodation aims at returning the employee to work. The medical demotion CDCR did offer, which carries a right of reinstatement if the condition improves, was treated as the accommodation FEHA required on this record.

The California Supreme Court holds that a coworker's single use of the N-word can be actionable harassment under the FEHA if sufficiently severe under the totality of the circumstances, and that withdrawing an employee's means of reporting harassment can be an adverse action for retaliation; summary judgment reversed.

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.

Raines v. U.S. Healthworks Medical Group Business-Entity Agents Can Be Directly Liable Under FEHA Raines v. U.S. Healthworks Medical Group (2023) 15 Cal.5th 268 Parallel citations: 534 P.3d 40; 312 Cal.Rptr.3d 301. Supreme Court of California. Opinion filed August 21, 2023. Docket No. S273630. On a question certified by the United States Court of Appeals […]

California religious-accommodation litigation runs on two tracks that are routinely confused, and Groff v. DeJoy answers only one of them. Groff told the lower courts that the de minimis gloss they had drawn from a single line of Hardison does not establish undue hardship, and that an employer must instead show substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of its particular business — while expressly declining to adopt the ADA's "significant difficulty or expense" standard, which is the very phrase Government Code section 12926, subdivision (u) has long used to define undue hardship under FEHA. This analysis sets the two texts side by side, states precisely what Groff did and did not do to Hardison, traces the collective-bargaining limit through Soldinger, and then marks the point at which none of it matters: where the ministerial exception applies, it is an affirmative defence that removes the claim rather than a weight in the hardship calculus.

Government Code section 12940, subdivision (n) makes it unlawful to fail to engage in a timely, good faith interactive process, and an employee may sue on that practice alone. The received wisdom that California courts are split on whether such a plaintiff must also prove an available accommodation has not been accurate since 2009. This analysis traces the rule from Claudio through Wysinger, Nadaf-Rahrov and Scotch to Shirvanyan, isolates the two words that carry the element, and sets out exactly what must be proved, by whom, and as of when.

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 employee-non-solicitation provision was void under section 16600 because it restrained the individual defendants — recruiters whose profession is recruiting and placing nurses — from engaging in their chosen profession; applying Edwards, the court declined to use the older “reasonableness” analysis and held such…

FEHA defines both mental and physical disability to include being regarded or treated by the employer as having a condition that makes achievement of a major life activity difficult, and the Legislature enacted those paragraphs by number, expressly notwithstanding Cassista. Gelfo held that the only question under the prong is what the employer believed — no actual disability, no mistake, no myths-or-stereotypes showing — and, breaking with the federal authority then controlling in the Eighth and Ninth Circuits, that a perceived-disability plaintiff is owed reasonable accommodation and the interactive process. Wallace removed animosity from the elements and refused to let an honest mistake count as a legitimate reason; Soria extended the prong to conditions that are merely potentially disabling. What the prong does not do is lower the definitional floor, which is where Higgins-Williams sits — and, as this analysis shows, where the real contest now is.

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.

Section 16600 voids contracts that restrain anyone from engaging in a lawful profession, trade, or business; Edwards’s noncompetition agreement was therefore invalid. California does not recognize the federal courts’ “narrow-restraint” exception — even a limited or partial restraint on practicing one’s profession is…

A White news anchor’s claim that his station’s “on-air style” rationale masked race-conscious hiring failed on summary judgment because the record corroborated the employer’s subjective assessment, and his sole contrary showing — that the executive lied about counseling him — could not alone support the inference that race was the real reason.

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 Fourth District held that while the timing of an adverse action can carry a FEHA retaliation plaintiff past the prima facie stage — even on an uncorroborated declaration — temporal proximity does not, standing alone, create a triable issue of pretext once the employer produces evidence of a legitimate reason, and it expressly rejected Gemini Aluminum's suggestion that employers must also prove their termination procedures were objectively fair.

On retransfer from the Supreme Court in light of Yanowitz, the First District reversed a $75,000 retaliation verdict, holding that file memoranda, a letter of instruction, an investigation, an unimplemented 30-day suspension, and a lateral transfer to a comparable position did not — separately or collectively — materially affect the terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, and that the surgeon's beliefs about her employer's motives were not substantial evidence of pretext.

Three different doctrines collide in public-sector termination cases, and collapsing them is the most expensive mistake in this corner of California employment law. Exhaustion of administrative remedies is a prerequisite to suing at all. Exhaustion of judicial remedies is the separate Westlake requirement that an employee who has already lost before a personnel board overturn that decision by administrative mandamus under Code of Civil Procedure section 1094.5 before suing on the same facts. And collateral estoppel is what happens if the employee does not: the agency's findings become final and bind. Johnson v. City of Loma Linda extended the rule to FEHA while holding it inapplicable to Title VII, Page applied it on demurrer, and Skelly supplies the due-process floor the agency hearing must meet. This analysis keeps the three apart, states what each anchor actually held and how it was disposed of, and sets out the sequencing obligation a practitioner owes a public-employee client at intake.

The Sixth District affirmed summary judgment for the City, holding that a five-year pattern of stripping a female employee's coveted technical duties was "a collection of isolated employment decisions" that had acquired permanence by 1996 under Richards v. CH2M Hill — and that a biased supervisor's sexist remarks could not show pretext where he neither knew of her candidacy nor took part in the challenged hiring.

“Academic catfighting or anti-Semitism?” — a professor’s proof that her tenure denial rested on a hidden, forbidden “collegiality” criterion defeated her own FEHA claim, because the same evidence showed the real motive was a colleague’s grudge, not her religion.

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.

Affirming a remitted $500,000 FEHA retaliation judgment for a Nigerian-American harbor-department engineer, the Second District held that pretext may be shown by direct evidence of decisionmakers' retaliatory remarks and by comparative evidence of disparate treatment — not only by a head-on attack on the employer's stated performance reasons — and that lay testimony alone can support a substantial emotional-distress award.

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.

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.