California employment case index

Luis Betanco delivered Living Spaces furniture from the retailer's California distribution centers to California customers and never crossed a state line. In a published decision filed June 25, 2026, the First District held he is still a 'transportation worker' exempt from the Federal Arbitration Act, because he was actively engaged in the interstate transportation of goods even though he made retail — not wholesale — deliveries. The furniture was inevitably destined from the outset of its interstate journey to his customers, so it never left the interstate stream even though it paused in a California warehouse. Because the FAA does not reach a section 1-exempt worker, Labor Code section 229 kept his statutory wage claims in court, and his representative PAGA claims survived under Adolph v. Uber Technologies. The order was affirmed.

A Tesla yard hostler who moved 53-foot trailers of out-of-state auto parts around the Fremont factory — never crossing a state line — sued for wage-and-hour violations, and Tesla moved to compel individual arbitration. In the published portion of its opinion, the First District holds yard hostlers are FAA section 1 transportation workers exempt from arbitration, and clarifies which wage claims Labor Code section 229 keeps in court.

Cambodian villagers forced to work at Thai seafood factories sued a U.S. marketer under the trafficking civil-remedy statute; their case was dismissed because the statute then reached only those who succeeded in benefiting, not those who attempted to. After Congress amended the law, the en banc Ninth Circuit holds the clarifying amendment retroactive — and that Landgraf governs all such amendments, overruling the “clarifying amendment” exception — reviving the claims.

For two decades employers have split a single hiring bargain across two pieces of paper: a clean, mutual arbitration agreement, and a separate confidentiality or non-competition agreement that quietly routes the employer's own claims to court. Beginning with Alberto v. Cambrian Homecare in 2023, the Court of Appeal built an answer out of Civil Code section 1642 – documents executed as parts of substantially one transaction are read together, so unconscionability in the companion document is unconscionability in the agreement to arbitrate. In February 2026 the California Supreme Court endorsed that approach in Fuentes v. Empire Nissan, Inc., and added the correction that matters most in practice: a court may not resolve the resulting ambiguity by invoking a policy favouring arbitration. This article states the rule the Alberto-Silva-Gurganus-Cluck line and Fuentes together now supply, and the limits of each.