Moniz v. Adecco USA, Inc.

Facts

Adecco supplies temporary labor to companies including Google. In March 2017 Paola Correa joined an existing San Francisco suit, Doe v. Google, alleging that Google’s and Adecco’s confidentiality rules violated the Labor Code; a month later Rachel Moniz filed this PAGA action in San Mateo County making similar allegations against Adecco. (Moniz, supra, 109 Cal.App.5th at p. 323.) The two cases proceeded on parallel tracks with early procedural friction — split demurrer rulings on federal preemption, a denied coordination petition, and a reversal in Doe v. Google (2020) 54 Cal.App.5th 948. (Ibid.) Correa tried to intervene in Moniz’s suit and lost; the denial was affirmed in an unpublished 2020 decision (Moniz I). (Id. at pp. 323–324.)

Moniz then settled with Adecco. The trial court approved the settlement, and Correa — via a motion to vacate the judgment — appealed. In Moniz v. Adecco USA, Inc. (2021) 72 Cal.App.5th 56 (Moniz II), Division Four held Correa had appellate standing: she became a party of record by moving to vacate, and although she “did not own a personal claim for PAGA civil penalties,” she was “aggrieved” because she was “deputized in her own action to prosecute Adecco’s Labor Code violations on behalf of the state.” (Moniz, supra, 109 Cal.App.5th at p. 324, describing Moniz II, at p. 73.) Moniz II expressly disagreed with the Court of Appeal’s contrary decision in Turrieta v. Lyft — and found the settlement unfair in one respect, reversing. (Id. at p. 324.)

On remand, Moniz and Adecco revised the deal: Adecco would pay about $4.6 million in penalties, with $1.5 million earmarked for Moniz’s counsel. Over Correa’s opposition, the trial court approved the revised settlement, awarded Moniz’s counsel $1.479 million in fees, awarded Correa $21,000 in fees for her contributions, and denied her request for a $10,000 service award. (Moniz, supra, 109 Cal.App.5th at pp. 324–325.) Correa and her counsel again moved to vacate, were denied, and appealed (A168481, A168872). While those appeals were pending, the Supreme Court decided Turrieta v. Lyft, Inc. (2024) 16 Cal.5th 664 — affirming the decision Moniz II had rejected and disapproving Moniz II’s standing analysis at pages 708 to 710. (Id. at p. 325.)

Procedural history

This appeal is the second round of appellate review of the Moniz–Adecco settlement. Round one produced Moniz II’s standing holding and fairness reversal (2021). Round two — after the revised settlement, renewed objections, fee awards, and denial of Correa’s postjudgment motions under Code of Civil Procedure sections 659 and 663a — arrived at Division Four just as Turrieta reset the governing law. (Moniz, supra, 109 Cal.App.5th at pp. 324–325.) The court requested the parties’ positions on Turrieta’s effect, “reexamin[ed] the question of Correa’s appellate standing in light of Turrieta,” and dismissed both appeals. (Id. at pp. 322–323, 336.)

Issue

After Turrieta held that a PAGA plaintiff’s status as the state’s proxy confers no authority to intervene in, move to vacate, or appeal from the judgment in another plaintiff’s overlapping PAGA action, two questions remained for Correa’s appeals: does Moniz II’s earlier standing ruling survive as law of the case; and can an overlapping PAGA plaintiff establish the appellate standing Turrieta denied by invoking her own “personal interests” — the penalty share, fee entitlement, cost protection, service award, and remediation interest that PAGA gives an aggrieved employee — rather than her role as the state’s representative? (Moniz, supra, 109 Cal.App.5th at pp. 329–331.)

Holding

Reasoning

Turrieta’s framework, faithfully applied. The court began from Turrieta’s account of PAGA’s architecture: a PAGA action is “an enforcement action between the LWDA and the employer,” a “type of qui tam action” in which the plaintiff sues as the state’s “‘proxy or agent’” and “[t]he government entity on whose behalf the plaintiff files suit is always the real party in interest.” (Moniz, supra, 109 Cal.App.5th at pp. 325–326, quoting Turrieta, supra, 16 Cal.5th at pp. 681–682.) Turrieta had searched PAGA’s text and scheme and found intervention by overlapping plaintiffs “neither reasonably necessary to effectuate PAGA’s purpose nor consistent with the Legislature’s intent”: the statute commits settlement oversight to the LWDA and the trial court alone; overlapping plaintiffs — unlike neutral courts — carry “a financial interest in disrupting settlements to recover attorney’s fees”; and multiple proxies for the same principal would generate unanswerable questions about who controls the litigation. (Id. at pp. 327–328, citing Turrieta, at pp. 691–703.) Vacatur and appeal failed “for essentially the same reasons.” (Id. at p. 329, quoting Turrieta, at p. 711.)

Law of the case yields to an intervening high-court decision. Correa argued Moniz II’s standing holding governed this second appeal. The doctrine, however, “may be disregarded where the ‘controlling rules of law have been altered or clarified by a decision intervening between the first and second appellate determinations’” — and Turrieta not only altered the rule but disapproved Moniz II by name. (Moniz, supra, 109 Cal.App.5th at pp. 329–330, quoting Truck Ins. Exchange v. Kaiser Cement & Gypsum Corp. (2024) 16 Cal.5th 67, 87, fn. 6.)

The personal-interest caveat is real — but it does not fit repackaged statutory interests. Turrieta expressly reserved whether an aggrieved employee might intervene to vindicate a genuinely personal interest, a caveat two concurring justices underscored. (Moniz, supra, 109 Cal.App.5th at pp. 328–329, citing Turrieta, supra, 16 Cal.5th at pp. 684 & fn. 6, 705, fn. 21, 717 (conc. opn. of Kruger, J.).) Correa claimed that reservation: she listed her nonwaivable right to bring a PAGA claim, her 25 percent penalty share as an aggrieved employee, her fee and cost entitlements, a potential service award, and her interest in remediating ongoing violations, arguing Moniz’s settlement jeopardized them all through claim preclusion. (Id. at pp. 330–331.) The court noted preliminarily that her motion below had been framed in her representative capacity — her own briefing described her as “the PAGA Representative in an overlapping case” — but excused any forfeiture because the appellate arguments were purely legal. (Id. at p. 331.)

Why the repackaging fails. The dispositive move is structural. Since PAGA is “‘simply a procedural statute’” creating no property rights (Moniz, supra, 109 Cal.App.5th at p. 332, quoting Amalgamated Transit Union, Local 1756, AFL-CIO v. Superior Court (2009) 46 Cal.4th 993, 1003), every interest Correa asserted flows from the statute and from her role in enforcing it: “There is no substantive difference, then, between saying that a PAGA plaintiff has an interest to support intervention in an overlapping PAGA suit by virtue of being the state’s proxy in a suit to recover 75 percent of the civil penalties in the overlapping action and saying that the plaintiff has an interest to support intervention by virtue of an interest in 25 percent of the civil penalties in the overlapping suit,” a service award, fees and costs, or cost protection. (Id. at p. 332.) Either framing gives “the same class of people” an interest “arising from the same law” — so accepting it “would entitle every PAGA plaintiff in an overlapping suit to intervene or move to vacate the judgment — which is exactly the opposite of what Turrieta concluded.” (Ibid.)

Turrieta’s practical concerns apply with equal force — and then some. The oversight structure (LWDA plus trial court) “no more support[s] oversight by a PAGA plaintiff acting in a private capacity than … one acting on behalf of the state”; the financial incentive to disrupt settlements is identical; and “[t]he history of this suit demonstrates precisely this risk, since Correa has consistently sought to disrupt Moniz’s settlement.” (Moniz, supra, 109 Cal.App.5th at p. 333.) Worse, some of Correa’s asserted interests belong to her as an aggrieved employee — a status shared by the entire affected workforce — so her theory would arm “every aggrieved employee affected by either suit” with vacatur rights, and would “create a bypass route around the requirement of notice to the LWDA”: any employee “could simply wait until someone else obtains express or tacit permission from the LWDA to file a private suit and then insert himself or herself into the litigation via intervention or, if the employee was not satisfied with a settlement or verdict, through vacatur.” (Id. at p. 334.)

Class-action analogies and clever hypotheticals rejected. Hernandez v. Restoration Hardware — where absent class members may intervene or move to vacate — does not transfer, because “[t]he interest at stake in a PAGA action is that of the state, not the employees themselves”: no one can opt out of a PAGA suit, and penalties “belong to the state and are shared with aggrieved employees by statute.” (Moniz, supra, 109 Cal.App.5th at p. 334.) Correa’s reply-brief hypotheticals — the professional objector, the time-barred representative, the de minimis claimant — earned “credit for ingenuity” but no traction: Turrieta’s concerns about legislative silence, disruption incentives, and unwieldy multiparty control “extend to — and far beyond — the three hypothetical plaintiffs Correa imagines.” (Id. at p. 335.) The court closed with its institutional posture: it “will not gut the holding in a decision by our high court based on semantics or technicalities … which have no material significance or distinction from Turrieta’s rationale.” (Ibid.)

Significance

Moniz is the first published answer to the question Turrieta left open — and the answer is that the personal-interest caveat is far narrower than objectors hoped. The Kruger concurrence had preserved the possibility that some genuinely individual stake might support intervention under Code of Civil Procedure section 387; Moniz holds that the stakes PAGA itself confers — penalty shares, fees, service awards, cost protection, even the nonwaivable right to prosecute — do not qualify, because they are the state-proxy interest under another name. (109 Cal.App.5th at pp. 331–334.) After Moniz, the caveat plausibly survives only for interests arising outside the statute, and the opinion identifies none.

The decision completes the settlement-finality architecture the Supreme Court began building in Turrieta: LWDA notice and trial-court fairness review are the exclusive checks on an overlapping settlement, and a rival plaintiff’s remedies are persuasion in the trial court — Moniz itself shows objectors may be heard there, and Correa was even awarded $21,000 in fees for work that benefited the settlement — not intervention, vacatur, or appeal. (Id. at pp. 324–325, 327–328.) Note what the case does not decide: Turrieta disclaimed any holding that PAGA bars intervention (16 Cal.5th at p. 705, fn. 21, discussed at 109 Cal.App.5th at p. 329); whether Correa’s counsel had an independent interest in the fee award went unresolved because it was never asserted (id. at p. 331, fn. 3); and the court expressly reserved any view of the 2024 PAGA amendments, which took effect mid-appeal (id. at p. 325, fn. 2). For the pre-reform statute, though, the message to would-be objectors is uniform across Turrieta, Moniz, and the preclusion cases: the fight over an overlapping settlement happens before judgment, in the approving court, or not at all — while LaCour v. Marshalls polices the other flank by limiting what such a settlement can preclude to the scope of the first plaintiff’s LWDA notice.

Key quotes

“[T]he personal interests she asserts arise by virtue of PAGA itself and are mostly derivative of her representation of the state’s interest as a PAGA plaintiff, so those interests are subject to the same analysis and lead to the same outcome as in Turrieta.” (Moniz, supra, 109 Cal.App.5th at pp. 331–332.)

“If a PAGA plaintiff could obtain standing to intervene or move to vacate in an overlapping suit merely by engaging in the semantic exercise of relabeling his or her interest arising from the statute as a private one rather than one as the state’s proxy, Turrieta’s holding precluding intervention or vacatur solely by virtue of status as an overlapping PAGA plaintiff would have no effect.” (Moniz, supra, 109 Cal.App.5th at p. 332.)

“We are mindful of this court’s role in the judicial system and will not gut the holding in a decision by our high court based on semantics or technicalities like those raised by Correa, which have no material significance or distinction from Turrieta’s rationale.” (Moniz, supra, 109 Cal.App.5th at p. 335.)

Read the full opinion (CourtListener) →

Practice pointer

Open questions

What, if anything, remains of Turrieta’s personal-interest caveat? Moniz disqualifies every interest “aris[ing] by virtue of PAGA itself” (109 Cal.App.5th at pp. 331–332), but neither decision identifies an interest that would qualify, and the concurring justices’ preserved possibility now awaits a litigant with a stake genuinely independent of the statute. Whether objecting counsel could ever assert an independent interest in a fee award was expressly left undecided. (Id. at p. 331, fn. 3.) The court likewise expressed “no opinion on operation of the newly amended provisions” of the 2024 PAGA reform (id. at p. 325, fn. 2) — and because the reform rewrote standing, cure, and penalty-allocation rules for notices filed on or after June 19, 2024, whether its architecture changes the overlapping-plaintiff calculus is open. Also unresolved: Turrieta disclaimed holding that PAGA bars intervention (16 Cal.5th at p. 705, fn. 21), so a trial court’s discretionary decision to permit some participation short of party status remains theoretically available — Moniz addresses authority, not prohibition. Finally, the decision assumes without deciding that a prevailing PAGA plaintiff may collect a service award at all (109 Cal.App.5th at p. 332) — a recurring skirmish that still lacks published resolution.