California employment case index

A former Work Practice Apprentice at the San Francisco Zen Center won a wage award, but the trial court held the First Amendment’s ministerial exception barred his claims. The First District reverses, adopting its companion case Lorenzo: the exception bars only claims that require resolving ecclesiastical questions, and the Center showed none. NOTE: the controlling ministerial-exception issue is now before the California Supreme Court in Lorenzo (S294565), so this opinion is citable for persuasive value only.

A work practice apprentice at one of North America’s largest Soto Zen Buddhist temples conceded she was a minister, sued only for the minimum and overtime wages she had already earned, and lost on summary judgment to the First Amendment ministerial exception. Division Five of the First District reversed on two independent grounds. The exception, it held, bars only those employment claims that necessarily require an inquiry into matters of a religious entity’s internal government closely linked to its faith and doctrine — and the Center never explained how a minimum-wage claim required one, conceding in its brief that adjudicating the case raised no ecclesiastical question. Separately, because the Labor Commissioner had found two individuals liable as the employer under Labor Code section 558.1, each of them had to post an undertaking under section 98.2 to perfect a de novo appeal; neither did, so the trial court had no jurisdiction over their appeals. The California Supreme Court granted review on February 11, 2026, limited to the ministerial-exception question, but denied depublication and directed that the opinion may still be cited both for its persuasive value and to establish a conflict in authority. This analysis sets out the Court’s own issue statement, what the Court of Appeal actually held and on what evidence, and exactly how much weight the opinion carries while review is pending.

California religious-accommodation litigation runs on two tracks that are routinely confused, and Groff v. DeJoy answers only one of them. Groff told the lower courts that the de minimis gloss they had drawn from a single line of Hardison does not establish undue hardship, and that an employer must instead show substantial increased costs in relation to the conduct of its particular business — while expressly declining to adopt the ADA's "significant difficulty or expense" standard, which is the very phrase Government Code section 12926, subdivision (u) has long used to define undue hardship under FEHA. This analysis sets the two texts side by side, states precisely what Groff did and did not do to Hardison, traces the collective-bargaining limit through Soldinger, and then marks the point at which none of it matters: where the ministerial exception applies, it is an affirmative defence that removes the claim rather than a weight in the hardship calculus.

The unpaid-wages component of section 558 is not a civil penalty recoverable through PAGA; only the fixed civil penalties ($50/$100 per employee per pay period) are PAGA penalties. Because the unpaid wages are not part of the PAGA claim, the trial court could not compel that portion to arbitration as if it were.

FEHA defines both mental and physical disability to include being regarded or treated by the employer as having a condition that makes achievement of a major life activity difficult, and the Legislature enacted those paragraphs by number, expressly notwithstanding Cassista. Gelfo held that the only question under the prong is what the employer believed — no actual disability, no mistake, no myths-or-stereotypes showing — and, breaking with the federal authority then controlling in the Eighth and Ninth Circuits, that a perceived-disability plaintiff is owed reasonable accommodation and the interactive process. Wallace removed animosity from the elements and refused to let an honest mistake count as a legitimate reason; Soria extended the prong to conditions that are merely potentially disabling. What the prong does not do is lower the definitional floor, which is where Higgins-Williams sits — and, as this analysis shows, where the real contest now is.

The employee bears the burden of proving he or she is a qualified individual under the FEHA — that is, able to perform the essential duties of the position with or without reasonable accommodation — just as the federal ADA requires; it is not the employer’s burden to disprove qualification.

The FEHA requires only that a physiological disease or condition affecting a body system “limit” — not “substantially limit” — the plaintiff’s ability to participate in a major life activity, a standard broader than the federal ADA; the later Poppink Act merely clarified, and did not change, that existing “limits”…