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.

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.

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.

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.

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 […]

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.

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.

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…

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.

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…

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.

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.

A Recology supervisor who reported CRV weight-tag fraud to police and the company's board survived summary judgment: the Court of Appeal held Labor Code section 1102.5 protects reports of illegal conduct by fellow employees and third parties — not just the employer's own violations — and revived his False Claims Act and Tameny claims.

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.

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.

A 305-pound applicant rejected by a Santa Cruz health food collective sued under the FEHA, alleging she was regarded as physically handicapped because of her weight. The California Supreme Court held that weight may qualify as a protected disability only where medical evidence shows it results from a physiological condition affecting a basic bodily system and limits a major life activity, and that this plaintiff – who maintained she was healthy and fit – had proved no such thing. Government Code section 12926.1 now names the case and disclaims several of its interpretations.