California employment case index

Lauren Brown filed the fifth of five overlapping PAGA actions against the same restaurant operator. While her case sat stayed, the employer settled globally with an earlier plaintiff, and the trial court then granted judgment on the pleadings. Division Eight affirmed. The only contested question it reached was whether the settling plaintiff's failure to wait the full 65 days after her amended agency notice destroyed the settlement's preclusive effect – and the court held it did not, because nothing extends the waiting period to amended notices and the agency itself had accepted the settlement. Brown also lacked standing for violations postdating her 2018 separation.

The Department of Consumer Affairs refused to discuss settlement, refused to stipulate to an amendment, demurred, moved for summary adjudication, rejected a $600,000 section 998 offer and lost a six-week trial – and then appealed the $4,889,786.03 fee award that followed. Division Eight affirmed all of it: top-of-market Los Angeles rates supported by the trial judge's own observation of counsel, a 1.75 multiplier through verdict and 1.25 on the fee litigation, and two holdings with reach – that a fee payable from public funds does not bar an enhancement, and that Ketchum's rule does not apply to FEHA fees, which section 12965 makes discretionary and therefore contingent until the final fee order.

A jury found that the Department of State Hospitals discriminated against Ashley Howell because of a mental disability, and awarded her lost earnings, lost health insurance, and nothing for pain and suffering. By the end of the appeal the insurance award was gone, the zero pain-and-suffering verdict stood, and a $1.75 million attorney fee request had been reduced to $135,102. The insurance award fell because Howell proved an obligation rather than a loss: she introduced a premium invoice she never paid, and she bought no replacement coverage, so there was nothing to compensate. The fee award survived because the trial court could not audit block-billed hours and because the request had grown more than tenfold from counsel's own pretrial estimate. Howell's only appellate win was a remand to rule on the prejudgment interest nobody had opposed. This is an adverse decision, and its value to the plaintiff's bar is as a checklist of what the damages and fee record has to contain.

Tilly’s required retail workers to phone the store exactly two hours before every on-call shift — under threat of written discipline — and paid nothing if the answer was ‘don’t come in.’ Division Three held, 2–1, that this triggers Wage Order 7 reporting-time pay: ‘reporting for work’ means presenting oneself as ordered, and the employer’s own directions define the manner, whether that is walking through the door, logging on remotely, or making a mandatory call. The holding is deliberately tied to the two-hour call-in regime, the retroactivity question was expressly left open, and Justice Egerton’s partial dissent — built on 18,000 pages of IWC history — supplies the employer playbook. Review was denied; Ward remains the leading California authority on call-in scheduling.

Stoneledge paid furniture sales associates on commission with a guaranteed $12.01 hourly draw that was deducted from later commissions. The Court of Appeal reversed summary judgment for the employer, holding that Wage Order No. 7 requires separate compensation for rest periods and applies equally to commissioned employees, piece-rate employees, or any other system that does not pay for rest breaks. The draws were not compensation at all – at best, interest-free loans.

Answering three questions certified by the Ninth Circuit, the California Supreme Court held that the “nature of the work” under the wage orders' seating provision refers to the tasks an employee performs at a given location – not to the whole job – and that whether the work reasonably permits sitting is an objective, totality-of-the-circumstances question in which employer business judgment and workplace layout are relevant but not dispositive. If the employer contends no suitable seat exists, it bears the burden of proving unavailability.

Government Code section 12965(b) governs both fee and cost awards in FEHA actions and makes them discretionary under the asymmetric Christiansburg standard: a prevailing plaintiff ordinarily recovers fees and costs, but a prevailing defendant may recover them only if the action was objectively frivolous, unreasonable,…

Attorney fees awarded under section 12965 belong to the attorneys whose services earned them, except to the extent the attorneys and client have entered an enforceable agreement providing otherwise; the portion of a statutory fee award exceeding fees the client already paid does not belong to the client by default.

A worker fired nine months into his vacation year was denied every day of accrued vacation pay because his employer's policy made eligibility turn on still being employed on his anniversary date – a rule it had applied to roughly 300 departing employees. A unanimous Supreme Court held the policy could not defeat the right. Vacation pay is not a gratuity but deferred wages earned by the year's labor, so a proportionate right to it vests as the work is performed, exactly as pension rights vest on acceptance of employment. An anniversary requirement is at most a condition subsequent, and Labor Code section 227.3 forbids an employer policy from turning that condition into a forfeiture of what has already been earned.