California employment case index

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.

Luis Betanco delivered Living Spaces furniture from the retailer's California distribution centers to California customers and never crossed a state line. In a published decision filed June 25, 2026, the First District held he is still a 'transportation worker' exempt from the Federal Arbitration Act, because he was actively engaged in the interstate transportation of goods even though he made retail — not wholesale — deliveries. The furniture was inevitably destined from the outset of its interstate journey to his customers, so it never left the interstate stream even though it paused in a California warehouse. Because the FAA does not reach a section 1-exempt worker, Labor Code section 229 kept his statutory wage claims in court, and his representative PAGA claims survived under Adolph v. Uber Technologies. The order was affirmed.

Marshalls moved to compel arbitration of the individual component of a single-count PAGA action under a 2014 arbitration agreement, relying on Viking River. Division Four affirmed the denial on pure contract grounds: the parties would have had to be clairvoyant to anticipate a distinction the Supreme Court would not draw for another eight years. The court expressly declined to enter the headless-PAGA dispute, and the authoring justice wrote separately at length questioning whether Viking River's federally imposed claim-splitting rule is constitutionally sound.

Lauren Brown filed the fifth of five overlapping PAGA actions against the same restaurant operator. While her case sat stayed, the employer settled globally with an earlier plaintiff, and the trial court then granted judgment on the pleadings. Division Eight affirmed. The only contested question it reached was whether the settling plaintiff's failure to wait the full 65 days after her amended agency notice destroyed the settlement's preclusive effect – and the court held it did not, because nothing extends the waiting period to amended notices and the agency itself had accepted the settlement. Brown also lacked standing for violations postdating her 2018 separation.

Billy Ford's 2018 arbitration agreement carved out representative claims under PAGA. After Viking River split PAGA claims into individual and non-individual halves, his employer argued the word representative had become ambiguous and that the FAA should resolve the ambiguity toward arbitration. The Third District affirmed the denial of the motion to compel, holding the clause unambiguous: because the contract was formed when settled California law forbade splitting a PAGA claim at all, the carve-out excludes every PAGA claim. Viking River changed the law of divisibility, not the principle that nobody arbitrates what they never agreed to arbitrate – a clean rule of construction for a very large installed base of legacy agreements.

Overlapping PAGA actions against one employer are now routine, and so is the race to settle. Turrieta v. Lyft decided what the losing racer may do about it: nothing. A non-settling plaintiff suing as the state's deputy on identical claims has no authority to intervene in the settling plaintiff's action, to require the court to hear objections, or to move to vacate the judgment — and Moniz v. Adecco (2025) holds that recasting the asserted stake as personal rather than sovereign changes none of it. What survives is not a voice in the first case but a defence in the second. Under Arias a PAGA judgment does bind non-party aggrieved employees; under LaCour v. Marshalls that preclusion must be proved, and a release reaching past the settling plaintiff's own agency authority binds her alone. The practical consequence is that the leverage has moved to the LWDA notice letter, which now measures what a PAGA plaintiff can ever release.

Does every PAGA action contain an individual claim an employer can compel to arbitration? The split the California Supreme Court will resolve.

Between Viking River in June 2022 and Adolph in July 2023, federal courts across California dismissed the non-individual half of PAGA cases for want of standing, on the United States Supreme Court's reading of California law. In Johnson the Ninth Circuit says what to do about those dismissals while the case is still on appeal: affirm the order compelling arbitration of the individual PAGA claim, vacate the dismissal of the non-individual claims – not because the district court erred, but because the California Supreme Court has since corrected the state-law premise – and remand so the district court can apply Adolph. The panel also rejected the argument that Adolph cannot be reconciled with Viking River. Judge Lee concurred to flag what he called a lurking tension between Adolph's bifurcation procedure and the Federal Arbitration Act: if an arbitrator's findings in a low-stakes individual arbitration can bind in a high-stakes representative action, the economics of arbitration change. He saw no irreconcilable conflict on these facts, and explained why – which is also a map of how the argument will be made next time.

Estrada v. Royalty Carpet Mills, Inc. (2024) 15 Cal.5th 582 holds that trial courts lack inherent authority to strike a PAGA claim as unmanageable, even if it is complex or time-intensive. Manageability is a class-action requirement that does not apply to PAGA; complexity must be handled through ordinary case-management tools, not dismissal.

For three years the first move in every large PAGA defence was a motion to strike the claim as unmanageable. Estrada v. Royalty Carpet Mills ended that unanimously, and ended it structurally: the Supreme Court did not weigh the policy and come out against, it found that no California court had ever possessed such a power and declined to create one. The question since is what remains, and the answer is more than defendants expected and less than they wanted. Evidence limits, scope limits, witness control, consolidation and ordinary merits rulings all survive untouched, and in 2024 the Legislature put the first two into Labor Code section 2699, subdivision (p) in almost the court's own words — while pointedly leaving out the dismissal power. The word manageability appears nowhere in the statute. What is left open is narrow: a due-process authority of last resort that Estrada reserved and no published decision has yet defined.

Adolph v. Uber Technologies, Inc. (2023) 14 Cal.5th 1104 holds that a PAGA plaintiff whose individual claims are compelled to arbitration retains standing as an “aggrieved employee” to litigate the non-individual representative claims in court — California’s answer to the standing question left open by Viking River.

The FAA preempts Iskanian to the extent it bars division of a PAGA action and prevents arbitration of an employee’s individual PAGA claim; an employer may compel the individual PAGA claim to arbitration. (The Supreme Court further opined that, under its reading of California law, the plaintiff would then lack standing…

Settling and dismissing individual Labor Code claims does not strip an employee of standing to pursue a PAGA claim. PAGA standing depends on being an “aggrieved employee” — someone employed by the alleged violator against whom one or more Labor Code violations were committed — not on maintaining an unredressed…

Iskanian v. CLS Transportation (2014) 59 Cal.4th 348 holds that class-action waivers in employment arbitration agreements are enforceable after Concepcion (abrogating Gentry), but a predispute waiver of a representative PAGA action is contrary to public policy and not preempted by the FAA, because a PAGA claim belongs to the state.

Arias v. Superior Court (2009) 46 Cal.4th 969 holds that a representative PAGA action for civil penalties need not satisfy class-action requirements, while a representative UCL claim for the same Labor Code violations must — and that a non-class PAGA action does not violate the employer’s due-process rights.

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.

Guz v. Bechtel National, Inc.The at-will presumption can be overcome by an implied-in-fact contract to discharge only for good cause, judged on the totality of the relationship — but the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing cannot impose substantive limits beyond the agreement’s actual terms, and a FEHA discrimination claim must survive the […]