California employment case index

Two Nordstrom employees worked stretches of more than six consecutive days, but never seven days inside a single established workweek, and always with at least one short shift. The Ninth Circuit certified three questions, and a unanimous Supreme Court answered all of them on one page: the day-of-rest guarantee runs by the workweek rather than on a rolling seven days, so runs spanning two workweeks are not per se prohibited; the six-hour exemption applies only where the employee never exceeds six hours on any day of that week, because the contrary reading would let a single short shift swallow the rule; and an employer 'causes' a lost day of rest by inducing the employee to forgo it, owing a duty to apprise employees of the right and then maintain absolute neutrality about its exercise.

The after-acquired-evidence defence is raised in a large share of wrongful-termination cases and its effect is routinely mis-stated. It does not defeat liability. Under McKennon it limits the remedy — no reinstatement and no front pay as a general rule, with backpay running from the unlawful discharge to the date the employer actually discovered the wrongdoing — and under Salas v. Sierra Chemical Co. the same is true in California of both after-acquired evidence and unclean hands, neither of which is a complete defence to a FEHA claim. This analysis fixes the cut-off date, sets out what the employer must prove to earn it, keeps Salas's immigration-status holding in its proper place as a separate federal overlay, and explains why Camp v. Jeffer, Mangels, Butler & Marmaro — the one California decision to produce a complete bar — now sits uneasily with Salas.