California employment case index

Inglewood’s elected city treasurer accused the mayor of misappropriating public funds, then saw her monthly salary cut from $8,000 to $1,404 and her duties stripped away. Her whistleblower retaliation suit under Labor Code section 1102.5 failed at the threshold: a unanimous Supreme Court held that elected officials are not “employees” within section 1106’s definition. Finding the statutory text inconclusive, the court rested on legislative history and context — section 1106 protects rank-and-file public workers, not officials who answer to the electorate — while noting that other remedies, including the First Amendment, may remain available.

A steelworker fired months after testifying in a coworker’s asbestos case revived his public-policy and FEHA disability claims: they required no CBA interpretation, his union could not waive his judicial forum, and coworker evidence that the termination-night incident was staged made pretext a jury question.

Age discrimination in violation of the FEHA supports a common-law claim for wrongful discharge in violation of public policy. When a plaintiff relies on a statutory prohibition to support such a claim, the common-law claim is subject to the statute’s substantive limits (the nature and scope of the prohibition) but not…

Nine days after Fatmeh Badih told her employer — a physician with fewer than five employees — that she was pregnant, her last day was set; the DFEH would not even accept her complaint because the office was too small for the FEHA. Division One of the First District affirmed her wrongful-discharge verdict anyway, holding that pregnancy discrimination is a form of sex discrimination under article I, section 8 of the California Constitution, whose fundamental public policy against sex discrimination in employment binds every employer regardless of size. Jennings v. Marralle was distinguished, not disturbed: age has no constitutional anchor, but sex — and therefore pregnancy — does. Badih remains the pleading answer for pregnancy discharges at California's smallest workplaces.

General Dynamics Corp. v. Superior CourtIn-house counsel may sue for wrongful termination — both on an implied-in-fact contract theory and, within limits, a Tameny public-policy theory — even though a client may generally discharge its lawyer at will.General Dynamics Corp. v. Superior Court (1994) 7 Cal.4th 1164Parallel citations: 876 P.2d 487; 32 Cal.Rptr.2d 1. Supreme […]

The discharge stated an actionable Tameny claim and was not preempted by the workers’-compensation law (id. at p. 1085). More durably, the court held that the public policy underpinning a Tameny claim must be “tethered to” specific constitutional or statutory provisions, not merely the court’s own notions of sound…