California employment case index

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.

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.

Three different doctrines collide in public-sector termination cases, and collapsing them is the most expensive mistake in this corner of California employment law. Exhaustion of administrative remedies is a prerequisite to suing at all. Exhaustion of judicial remedies is the separate Westlake requirement that an employee who has already lost before a personnel board overturn that decision by administrative mandamus under Code of Civil Procedure section 1094.5 before suing on the same facts. And collateral estoppel is what happens if the employee does not: the agency's findings become final and bind. Johnson v. City of Loma Linda extended the rule to FEHA while holding it inapplicable to Title VII, Page applied it on demurrer, and Skelly supplies the due-process floor the agency hearing must meet. This analysis keeps the three apart, states what each anchor actually held and how it was disposed of, and sets out the sequencing obligation a practitioner owes a public-employee client at intake.