California employment case index

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.

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.

The Supreme Court’s foundational “cat’s paw” decision: an employer is liable when a biased supervisor performs an act intended to cause an adverse employment action that is a proximate cause of the ultimate decision — even if the formal decisionmaker had no discriminatory animus. A decisionmaker’s “independent investigation” does not automatically break the causal chain, especially when it credits the biased actor’s report without independently confirming the action was justified.

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.

A worker fired nine months into his vacation year was denied every day of accrued vacation pay because his employer's policy made eligibility turn on still being employed on his anniversary date – a rule it had applied to roughly 300 departing employees. A unanimous Supreme Court held the policy could not defeat the right. Vacation pay is not a gratuity but deferred wages earned by the year's labor, so a proportionate right to it vests as the work is performed, exactly as pension rights vest on acceptance of employment. An anniversary requirement is at most a condition subsequent, and Labor Code section 227.3 forbids an employer policy from turning that condition into a forfeiture of what has already been earned.