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 solar-project electrician queued unpaid at a security gate while guards inspected vehicles, drove miles of access road under strict site rules, and ate lunch confined to a designated area under a CBA calling meal periods “unpaid.” Answering the Ninth Circuit, a unanimous Supreme Court held the exit procedure is compensable “hours worked”; the gate-to-lot drive is compensable only as “employer-mandated travel,” and only if the gate is the first location required for a reason beyond site access; and no collective bargaining agreement can waive the minimum wage for a meal period during which the employer’s confinement forecloses otherwise feasible personal activities.

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.