California employment case index

A firm filed a wage-and-hour class action duplicating one it had already filed elsewhere, then opposed a stay with a brief — drafted by a contract attorney using generative AI — full of nonexistent citations and at least eight fabricated quotations. The First District affirms $6,000 in section 128.7 sanctions: counsel of record bear ultimate responsibility for what they sign, and the duty to verify authority cannot be delegated to any form of technology.

A sheriff’s deputy proved every element of his whistleblower retaliation claim — and still left the courthouse owing costs. The jury found his protected disclosures were a factor in the County’s actions against him, but also that the County would have made the same decisions anyway. Division Four held that a plaintiff defeated by the section 1102.6 same-decision defense who obtains no relief has not brought a “successful action” under section 1102.5(j): no attorney’s fees, and the employer is the prevailing party for costs. The panel declined to extend Harris v. City of Santa Monica’s FEHA rule, agreed the contrary result would be “a rational policy choice,” and pointedly left the fix to the Legislature.

The First District held that an employer's same-decision showing under Labor Code § 1102.6 is a complete defense to a § 1102.5 whistleblower claim — barring declaratory relief and attorney's fees along with damages — expressly declining to import Harris v. City of Santa Monica's FEHA partial-defense rule.

An environmental consultant told his supervisor that the client's instruction to omit a decade of prior helicopter operations from a NEPA assessment was illegal, and was fired days later. The district court held the disclosure unprotected because the supervisor had no power to correct the client's noncompliance. Applying California's last-antecedent rule, the Ninth Circuit held that the 'authority to investigate, discover, or correct' clause in Labor Code section 1102.5(b) modifies only 'another employee,' so a report to one's own supervisor is protected standing alone. The panel also treated a disclosure to the client agency's project leader as a disclosure to a government agency, rejected the job-duties and wrongdoer defenses, and held that section 1102.5(b) reaches anticipated whistleblowing – while affirming judgment on the refusal-to-participate claim.

Months after Lawson, the Third District affirmed summary judgment for the County of Sacramento under Labor Code § 1102.6 — undisputed evidence of insubordination, disrespect, and dishonesty proved clearly and convincingly that the county would have released the probationary employee anyway — while leaving open whether § 1102.5 requires an actual belief that the law was violated.

Reversing summary judgment for the UC Regents, the Second District mapped the post-Lawson landscape — Labor Code § 1102.6 governs § 1102.5 claims, Government Code § 8547.10(e) supplies the same framework for University of California whistleblowers, and McDonnell Douglas still governs Health and Safety Code § 1278.5 claims, under which Scheer's clause-by-clause dismantling of his termination letter raised a triable issue of pretext.

The California Supreme Court holds that Labor Code §1102.6 — not McDonnell Douglas — governs §1102.5 whistleblower-retaliation claims: the employee need only show protected activity was a contributing factor, shifting to the employer the clear-and-convincing burden of proving it would have acted the same anyway.

Citigroup let employees take part of their annual compensation as discounted restricted stock vesting only after two years; an employee who resigned early forfeited both the shares and the pay used to buy them. The California Supreme Court affirmed summary judgment for the company, holding that no earned wages remained unpaid on resignation. The decision agrees that restricted stock is a wage – so it turns on when incentive compensation is earned, not on characterization – and expressly refuses to extend Suastez's pro rata vacation-vesting rule to voluntary incentive programs.