California employment case index

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.

Ask what California law says about rounding employees' time punches and the honest answer is that nobody knows. One Court of Appeal decision approved the practice in 2012, borrowing its standard from a federal regulation; it has never been overruled and still binds trial courts. But the Supreme Court has twice declined to adopt it, saying in Donohue that it "has never decided the validity of the rounding standard articulated in See's Candy I" — and then deciding that case on an assumption rather than an endorsement. Two Courts of Appeal have since rejected rounding where the employer captured exact minutes and underpaid anyway, and the Supreme Court granted review in both. The result is a genuine vacuum: the binding authority is the weakest, the strongest reasoning cannot bind, and the question sits with the Supreme Court in S277518. This piece sets out precisely what has been decided, what has not, and what to do in the meantime.

The after-acquired-evidence defence is raised in a large share of wrongful-termination cases and its effect is routinely mis-stated. It does not defeat liability. Under McKennon it limits the remedy — no reinstatement and no front pay as a general rule, with backpay running from the unlawful discharge to the date the employer actually discovered the wrongdoing — and under Salas v. Sierra Chemical Co. the same is true in California of both after-acquired evidence and unclean hands, neither of which is a complete defence to a FEHA claim. This analysis fixes the cut-off date, sets out what the employer must prove to earn it, keeps Salas's immigration-status holding in its proper place as a separate federal overlay, and explains why Camp v. Jeffer, Mangels, Butler & Marmaro — the one California decision to produce a complete bar — now sits uneasily with Salas.

There is no California statute or case law authorizing or prohibiting employee time rounding, so Division One borrowed the federal rule: an employer may round punch times to the nearest tenth of an hour if the policy is fair and neutral on its face and, as applied, does not fail over time to compensate employees for the time they actually worked. The posture is narrow – a writ vacating summary adjudication on two of the employer's affirmative defenses, with the court expressly leaving open whether either side will prevail. The plaintiff's expert lost the case by treating the employer's separate grace-period policy as if it were rounding. Whether neutral rounding survives at all is now pending before the California Supreme Court in Camp v. Home Depot, S277518.

Reeves v. Sanderson Plumbing Products, Inc.A plaintiff’s prima facie case combined with sufficient evidence that the employer’s stated reason is false can, without more, sustain a finding of intentional discrimination.Reeves v. Sanderson Plumbing Products, Inc. (2000) 530 U.S. 133Parallel citations: 120 S.Ct. 2097; 147 L.Ed.2d 105. Supreme Court of the United States. Argued March 21, […]

In McKennon v. Nashville Banner Publishing Co. (1995) 513 U.S. 352, a 62-year-old secretary discharged in what the employer conceded for summary-judgment purposes was age discrimination admitted in deposition that she had copied confidential company documents during her final year. The lower courts held this after-acquired evidence barred all ADEA relief. A unanimous Supreme Court, per Justice Kennedy, reversed. Such evidence does not bar liability — the ADEA violation that prompted the discharge cannot be disregarded — but it bears on the remedy: as a general rule it forecloses reinstatement and front pay, and back pay runs only from the date of the unlawful discharge to the date the employer discovered the wrongdoing. And the employer must first prove the wrongdoing was so severe that it would in fact have discharged the employee on that ground alone.

In Western Air Lines, Inc. v. Criswell (1985) 472 U.S. 400, the Supreme Court adopted the two-part age-BFOQ test for the Age Discrimination in Employment Act: the age limit must be reasonably necessary to the essence of the employer's business, and the employer must show either reasonable cause to believe that all or substantially all older workers cannot perform the job safely or that it is impossible or highly impractical to assess older employees individually. The Court rejected a deferential “rational basis” standard.