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.

Taking the walls off harassment law raises a harder question than the one it answers: if the conduct need not happen at work, what still has to connect it to this plaintiff? California answers with a nexus requirement, and the authorities disagree less than practitioners think. Fisher spoke of presence; Beyda read Fisher as requiring a nexus and held that awareness suffices; Carranza let a $4 million verdict stand on a photograph the plaintiff never saw circulate; and Kruitbosch held that where the harasser’s conduct is not work related, the employer’s response to the complaint can create a hostile environment all by itself. This is the companion to our analysis of the Okonowsky locus rule.

An employer must prove a reasonable, good-faith attempt to comply before escaping liquidated damages under Labor Code section 1194.2.

An LAPD captain never witnessed officers passing around a fake nude photo of her and was never confronted to her face — yet the Second District affirmed a $4 million FEHA verdict, holding that her secondhand knowledge of the department-wide circulation, and the LAPD’s refusal to stop it, supplied substantial evidence of a severe or pervasive hostile work environment. A leading application of Government Code section 12923.

Reversing summary judgment for United Airlines, the Court of Appeal held that whether three male employees with comparable social-media accounts were "similarly situated" comparators was a question for the jury, applied the continuing violation doctrine and section 12923's low bar to the harassment claim, and found a two-week complaint-to-termination gap sufficient for retaliation causation.

Harassment no longer happens in a place. A private Instagram account about a specific prison, a group chat, a warehouse saturated with misogynistic music — the dominant fact pattern in harassment intake now begins outside the premises. Okonowsky v. Garland rejects the notion that only conduct inside the physical workplace can be actionable and substitutes a test of effect plus employer response; Sharp v. S&S Activewear disposes of the targeting and equal-opportunity-harasser objections. This analysis sets out what the Ninth Circuit actually held, what it conspicuously did not, and why FEHA reaches the same question through a different instrument.

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.

Government Code section 12923 is the most consequential development in California harassment law in twenty years, and it is routinely read for more than it says. It declares that a single incident of harassing conduct is sufficient to create a triable issue, that harassment cases are rarely appropriate for summary judgment, and that one Ninth Circuit decision may not be used as a severity yardstick. What it does not do is repeal the severe-or-pervasive element or amend the operative prohibition. This analysis reads the section subdivision by subdivision against the federal case law it addresses, and sets out precisely what survives.

Troester v. Starbucks Corp. (2018) 5 Cal.5th 829 holds that California has not adopted the federal de minimis doctrine: an employer that requires small but regularly recurring off-the-clock work — here, several minutes of closing tasks each shift — must pay for that time and cannot invoke de minimis to avoid it.

Neither Labor Code section 1194 nor section 218.5 authorizes an award of attorney fees to a party that prevails on a section 226.7 claim; such claims are not actions for the nonpayment of minimum wages or overtime (§1194) and are not the kind of nonpayment-of-wages action that triggers §218.5 fee-shifting, so each…

Three Oracle instructors living in Colorado and Arizona worked a limited number of days in California for their California-headquartered employer. Answering certified questions from the Ninth Circuit, the California Supreme Court held that the Labor Code's overtime provisions apply to work performed in this state regardless of residence, and that those violations support a UCL claim – but that the UCL does not reach FLSA violations occurring in other states on these stipulated facts. The court confined its holding to overtime and to entire days and weeks worked in California.

The Fourth District affirmed a whistleblower-retaliation verdict for an Office on Aging director fired after warning that a County reorganization was unlawful — holding the County waived its exhaustion defense by first raising it after trial — while reversing her sexual-harassment claim under the pre-§ 12923 "severe or pervasive" standard and affirming a remittitur-backed new trial order on damages.

California does not permit wage averaging: the minimum-wage standard applies to each hour worked, and an employer must pay at least the minimum wage for every compensable hour; it cannot use higher pay for some hours to offset unpaid or sub-minimum hours.

The failure-to-prevent claim is pleaded in nearly every FEHA complaint and is the one FEHA claim that cannot stand alone. Government Code section 12940, subdivision (k) states the employer's preventive duty without any predicate condition, yet since Trujillo v. North County Transit Dist. the private claim has been derivative: a jury that finds no actionable discrimination, harassment or retaliation leaves nothing for the claim to rest on, and after Dickson v. Burke Williams harassing conduct that is not severe or pervasive will not serve. This analysis traces how the predicate rule was built, marks where it stops — it limits the private right of action rather than agency enforcement, it leaves the individual-defendant question open, and it survives section 12923 untouched — and sets out the symmetry practitioners miss most often: the same statutory duty whose breach grounds the plaintiff's claim supplies the first element of the employer's avoidable-consequences defence.