California employment case index

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.

A school district analyst who wanted to work entirely from home during and after the pandemic sued under FEHA and the Labor Code when her employer insisted on a phased return to the office. Division One affirmed summary judgment, holding that Government Code section 855.4 immunizes a public entity's discretionary decisions about controlling the spread of disease – including whether to permit remote work, when to require a return, and whether to mandate vaccination. But the court was explicit that it affirmed on immunity because the plaintiff's briefing 'contains no reasoned argument' explaining why her claims fell outside it, and it went on to affirm on three independent grounds: no qualifying disability, no admission of disability from holding interactive meetings, and no adverse employment action where a threatened leave was never imposed and the retirement was voluntary.

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.

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.

Tilly’s required retail workers to phone the store exactly two hours before every on-call shift — under threat of written discipline — and paid nothing if the answer was ‘don’t come in.’ Division Three held, 2–1, that this triggers Wage Order 7 reporting-time pay: ‘reporting for work’ means presenting oneself as ordered, and the employer’s own directions define the manner, whether that is walking through the door, logging on remotely, or making a mandatory call. The holding is deliberately tied to the two-hour call-in regime, the retroactivity question was expressly left open, and Justice Egerton’s partial dissent — built on 18,000 pages of IWC history — supplies the employer playbook. Review was denied; Ward remains the leading California authority on call-in scheduling.

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.

Stoneledge paid furniture sales associates on commission with a guaranteed $12.01 hourly draw that was deducted from later commissions. The Court of Appeal reversed summary judgment for the employer, holding that Wage Order No. 7 requires separate compensation for rest periods and applies equally to commissioned employees, piece-rate employees, or any other system that does not pay for rest breaks. The draws were not compensation at all – at best, interest-free loans.

Answering three questions certified by the Ninth Circuit, the California Supreme Court held that the “nature of the work” under the wage orders' seating provision refers to the tasks an employee performs at a given location – not to the whole job – and that whether the work reasonably permits sitting is an objective, totality-of-the-circumstances question in which employer business judgment and workplace layout are relevant but not dispositive. If the employer contends no suitable seat exists, it bears the burden of proving unavailability.

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 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.