Turrieta v. Lyft, Inc.

Facts

PAGA authorizes an “aggrieved employee” — “any person who was employed by the alleged violator and against whom one or more of the alleged violations was committed” — to recover, on the state’s behalf, civil penalties the LWDA could itself assess, after giving the agency notice and an opportunity to act. (Turrieta v. Lyft, Inc., supra, 16 Cal.5th at p. 681; see id. at pp. 675–676, citing Lab. Code, §§ 2699, former subds. (a), (c), 2699.3.) The LWDA takes 75 percent of any recovery; aggrieved employees take 25 percent. (Turrieta, at p. 681.) The case presented “what has become a common scenario in PAGA litigation: multiple persons claiming to be an ‘aggrieved employee’ … file separate and independent lawsuits seeking recovery of civil penalties from the same employer for the same alleged Labor Code violations.” (Id. at p. 676.)

Tina Turrieta, Brandon Olson, and Million Seifu each drove for Lyft, and each filed a separate PAGA action alleging Lyft misclassified drivers as independent contractors and failed to pay minimum wages, overtime, and expense reimbursement. (Turrieta, supra, 16 Cal.5th at pp. 676–678.) Olson petitioned in April 2019 to coordinate the actions; the petition was denied without prejudice, and Olson neither sought writ review nor then moved to intervene. (Id. at pp. 677–678.) In September 2019, Turrieta and Lyft mediated; when negotiation failed, they accepted the mediator’s own settlement proposal, which contemplated an amended complaint sweeping in all PAGA claims that could have been brought and notice to the LWDA. (Id. at p. 678.) Turrieta moved for judicial approval on December 9, 2019, serving the LWDA the same day with the settlement, the motion, and the proposed amended complaint. The LWDA filed no opposition or objection. (Id. at pp. 678–679.)

Olson and Seifu then surfaced. Olson moved to intervene on December 24, tendering a complaint in intervention that sought designation of his counsel as “Lead Counsel for the Aggrieved Employees,” service payments, costs, and attorney fees; Seifu moved to intervene and objected on December 31. (Turrieta, supra, 16 Cal.5th at pp. 678–679.) The trial court found “no exigent circumstances” to continue the hearing, ruled the movants lacked “standing to be heard on the appropriateness of the settlement,” overruled Seifu’s eve-of-hearing objection, and approved the settlement as “fair, adequate and reasonable” — expressly rejecting, as a factual matter, Seifu’s charge that Lyft had engaged in gamesmanship to shortchange other plaintiffs and the state, because the parties had accepted a “very experienced” mediator’s proposal. (Id. at p. 679.) Judgment entered January 6, 2020; the court denied Olson’s and Seifu’s motions to vacate under Code of Civil Procedure section 663. (Ibid.)

Procedural history

The Court of Appeal affirmed. It held Olson and Seifu were not “aggrieved” by the judgment — a PAGA claim “is a dispute between an employer and the state,” so it is the state’s rights, not a rival plaintiff’s, that a parallel settlement affects — and therefore they lacked standing to move to vacate or to appeal; and it held they had no “direct and immediate interest” in Turrieta’s settlement supporting mandatory or permissive intervention under Code of Civil Procedure section 387. (Turrieta v. Lyft, Inc., supra, 69 Cal.App.5th at pp. 970–972, 977, discussed at Turrieta, supra, 16 Cal.5th at pp. 679–680.)

The Supreme Court granted Olson’s petition and limited review to a single question: “Does a plaintiff in a representative action filed under [PAGA] have the right to intervene, or object to, or move to vacate, a judgment in a related action that purports to settle the claims that plaintiff has brought on behalf of the State?” (Turrieta, supra, 16 Cal.5th at p. 680.) It declined to add Olson’s further questions about notice-prerequisite authority and the standards governing settlement approval, and denied Seifu leave to file a late petition. (Id. at p. 680, fn. 2.) Because the case was litigated entirely under pre-reform law, the court expressly reserved any view on the sweeping 2024 PAGA amendments enacted a month before the decision. (Id. at p. 681, fn. 3.) The court affirmed. (Id. at p. 716.)

Issue

Whether a PAGA plaintiff’s statutory authority to commence and prosecute a representative action on the state’s behalf includes the authority — asserted exclusively on the state’s behalf, since Olson expressly disclaimed any personal interest — to (1) intervene under Code of Civil Procedure section 387 in another plaintiff’s overlapping PAGA action, (2) require the court to receive and consider objections to a proposed settlement of that action, and (3) move under Code of Civil Procedure section 663 to vacate the judgment entered on that settlement. (Turrieta, supra, 16 Cal.5th at pp. 680, 683–684 & fn. 6.)

Holding

Reasoning

The frame: not whether intervention is good policy, but what the statute delegates. Olson rested everything on his deputization: because the state could protect its interest in Turrieta’s action, and because he is the state’s proxy, he could too. The court reframed the question as one of statutory scope. Its precedents describing a PAGA plaintiff as the state’s “proxy or agent” do “little to establish or define the scope of a PAGA plaintiff’s authority to act on the state’s behalf” — after all, Amalgamated Transit held PAGA claims cannot be assigned, and ZB, N.A. held a PAGA plaintiff cannot recover everything the Labor Commissioner could. (Turrieta, supra, 16 Cal.5th at pp. 685–687, citing Amalgamated Transit Union, Local 1756, AFL-CIO v. Superior Court (2009) 46 Cal.4th 993, 1003, and ZB, N.A. v. Superior Court (2019) 8 Cal.5th 175, 182.) Olson himself conceded he was not authorized to act “‘on the State’s behalf for all purposes.’” (Turrieta, at p. 687.)

Text: the statute grants commencement and prosecution — and, by implication, the ordinary tools of a party litigating its own case. PAGA’s operative provisions authorize an aggrieved employee to “commence a civil action” after the notice process runs. (Turrieta, supra, 16 Cal.5th at p. 688.) Silence is not dispositive — “whatever is necessarily implied in a statute is as much a part of it as that which is expressed” — so the power to commence implies the power to prosecute, and with it “the power to use the ordinary tools of civil litigation incident to the power to prosecute, such as serving the summons and complaint, taking discovery, filing motions, attending trial, and presenting evidence.” (Id. at pp. 688–689, quoting Johnston v. Baker (1914) 167 Cal. 260, 264.) But whether the implied toolkit extends to policing a different plaintiff’s action on the state’s behalf was “less clear,” and it is “debatable” that such a power is reasonably necessary to PAGA’s objectives when the rival plaintiff is already representing the very same state interest. (Id. at pp. 689–690.)

Structure: when the Legislature addressed oversight, it named two overseers — the court and the LWDA. PAGA requires that complaints, proposed settlements, and judgments be routed to the LWDA, and that courts review and approve “any settlement.” (Turrieta, supra, 16 Cal.5th at pp. 691–692.) “The existence of detailed provisions regarding the state’s involvement in an aggrieved employee’s PAGA action, contrasted with the absence of any provision regarding involvement of anyone else,” signals that the Legislature did not contemplate rival-plaintiff oversight — a silence made “conspicuous” by the settlement provision itself, which requires simultaneous submission to the LWDA but says nothing about notice to other PAGA plaintiffs. (Id. at p. 692.) The 2016 amendments confirm the design: the Legislature expanded judicial approval to all settlements, deepened the LWDA’s involvement, and funded a PAGA unit within the agency precisely so those two institutions could perform oversight. (Id. at pp. 695–697.) Olson’s and the DLSE’s assertion that the LWDA lacks capacity was unsupported by record evidence, and in any event “is ultimately a matter for the Legislature to consider.” (Id. at pp. 697–698.) The court also contrasted true qui tam schemes: the False Claims Act pairs its intervention rights with first-to-file bars and detailed control provisions; PAGA has neither, leaving courts with no statutory answers to the “complex and unsettled questions” multiple competing proxies would generate — who controls the litigation, who may settle, who recovers fees. (Id. at pp. 699–701.)

The unanswered-questions problem is not hypothetical. Olson’s own proposed complaint in intervention sought lead-counsel designation and fees, and Accurso v. In-N-Out Burgers — the decision the dissent embraced — itself grew out of a failed global-settlement negotiation that foundered on “the proportionate sharing of attorney’s fees recovery.” (Turrieta, supra, 16 Cal.5th at pp. 699, 703.) The court declined to assume that intervention by financially interested rival plaintiffs and their counsel would systematically produce better-valued settlements rather than fee-driven holdups. (Id. at pp. 702–703.)

Vacatur and objections fall with intervention. Code of Civil Procedure section 663 lets “the party aggrieved” move to vacate, but says nothing about a non-party moving on an aggrieved party’s behalf; nothing in PAGA implies that power, and recognizing it “could leave courts faced with multiple motions to vacate and multiple appeals in a single PAGA action” by plaintiffs all claiming to speak for the same client. (Turrieta, supra, 16 Cal.5th at pp. 711–712.) The claimed right to force consideration of objections fared no better: PAGA’s requirement that settlements be submitted “to the agency” cannot plausibly be read to create an implicit objection right in the agency’s other “agents,” and Code of Civil Procedure section 187 confers discretion on courts, not rights on objectors. (Id. at pp. 713–715.)

What remains open — the safety valves. The court took pains to catalog what survives. Plaintiffs in overlapping actions may seek coordination or consolidation; “[n]othing in our opinion prevents” it. (Turrieta, supra, 16 Cal.5th at p. 706.) Courts “remain free to exercise discretion to consider arguments and evidence informally offered by plaintiffs pursuing overlapping PAGA claims,” and rival plaintiffs may take their concerns to the LWDA, which may itself comment on proposed settlements. (Id. at pp. 706–707.) The state’s own rights were expressly reserved. (Id. at p. 707, fn. 24.) And trial courts retain — as Williams holds and the concurrence underscores — a duty to ensure any PAGA settlement “is fair to those affected.” (Id. at p. 693, quoting Williams v. Superior Court (2017) 3 Cal.5th 531, 549.)

The concurrence: the state can participate; personal-interest intervention awaits another day. Justice Kruger, joined by Justice Groban, agreed with the dissent that “there is no apparent basis for questioning the right of the state to participate” in a PAGA suit — the state is the real party in interest, and the parties did not genuinely dispute its authority — but found it “a different question whether a plaintiff in a different, overlapping PAGA action has the same powers as the state,” an “unusual result” the Legislature forecloses in prototypical qui tam statutes through first-to-file rules. (Turrieta, supra, 16 Cal.5th at pp. 716–717 (conc. opn. of Kruger, J.).) She also underscored that the settlement-fairness duty binds the trial court “regardless of whether a particular aggrieved employee has the formal right to intervene.” (Id. at p. 717 (conc. opn. of Kruger, J.).)

The dissent: the analysis “starts in the wrong place.” Justice Liu, joined by Justice Evans, would have begun with the state: under century-old law a real party in interest may intervene under section 387, so the state may; and because a PAGA plaintiff “represents the same legal right and interest as state labor law enforcement agencies,” the deputy may assert that right too. (Turrieta, supra, 16 Cal.5th at pp. 717–720 (dis. opn. of Liu, J.).) The dissent warned that the decision “creates a substantial risk of auctioning the settlement of representative PAGA claims to the lowest bidder and insulating those settlements from appellate review” (id. at p. 718 (dis. opn. of Liu, J.)), noted the DLSE’s representation that it received 2,978 proposed-settlement notices in 2021 alone (id. at p. 728 (dis. opn. of Liu, J.)), and argued trial courts could screen out fee-seeking “professional objectors” case by case rather than by categorical exclusion (id. at pp. 722–723 (dis. opn. of Liu, J.)). The majority’s answer, throughout, was institutional: the policy debate is real, but it belongs to the Legislature. (Id. at pp. 705, 716.)

Significance

Turrieta is the controlling word on the procedural architecture of competing PAGA actions, and it decisively separates two ideas that earlier cases had blurred: representing the state’s interest and wielding the state’s powers. After Adolph and Kim confirmed broad standing, and Estrada curbed manageability strike-downs, Turrieta supplies the settlement-side rule: the first plaintiff to reach a court-approved deal can extinguish the state’s overlapping claims, and rival deputies have no formal mechanism — intervention, objection, or vacatur — to stop it. The decision disapproves Moniz’s contrary standing holding (Turrieta, supra, 16 Cal.5th at p. 710), distinguishes Uribe as a case where intervention had already been granted (id. at pp. 707–708), and pointedly declines to bless Accurso’s permissive-intervention reasoning (id. at p. 710). What it leaves standing is informal influence: comments the court may consider in its Williams fairness review, and advocacy directed at the LWDA.

The decision’s reach should not be overstated. It resolves only the overlapping-settlement posture, on an exclusively state-interest theory; personal-interest intervention, the state’s own participation rights, and every question under the 2024 reform legislation remain open. (Turrieta, supra, 16 Cal.5th at pp. 681, fn. 3, 683, fn. 6, 707, fn. 24.) Note, too, that the reverse-auction concern did not go unaddressed so much as reassigned: the majority located the safeguard in judicial approval and LWDA review, while the dissent doubted either has the capacity to catch a low-bid deal. For employers, Turrieta makes global PAGA settlements markedly more durable; for the plaintiffs’ bar, it converts the race to judgment into a race to the mediation table — subject to the qualitative fairness review that Williams and the concurrence emphasize.

Key quotes

“[W]e hold that an aggrieved employee’s status as the State’s proxy in a PAGA action does not give that employee the right to seek intervention in the PAGA action of another employee, to move to vacate a judgment entered in the other employee’s action, or to require a court to receive and consider objections to a proposed settlement of that action.” (Turrieta, supra, 16 Cal.5th at p. 716.)

“The existence of detailed provisions regarding the state’s involvement in an aggrieved employee’s PAGA action, contrasted with the absence of any provision regarding involvement of anyone else, suggests the Legislature neither envisioned nor intended that the scope of a duly deputized PAGA plaintiff’s power to prosecute claims on behalf of the state includes the power to intervene in the separate PAGA action of another plaintiff who has been duly deputized to prosecute the same claims on the state’s behalf.” (Turrieta, supra, 16 Cal.5th at p. 692.)

“Taken together, the court’s decision creates a substantial risk of auctioning the settlement of representative PAGA claims to the lowest bidder and insulating those settlements from appellate review.” (Turrieta, supra, 16 Cal.5th at p. 718 (dis. opn. of Liu, J.).)

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Practice pointer

Open questions

The reservations are as consequential as the holding. First, the court expressed “no opinion on whether the state itself has a right to intervene, to move to vacate the judgment, and/or to require courts to receive and consider settlement objections” (Turrieta, supra, 16 Cal.5th at p. 707, fn. 24) — though the concurrence, speaking for two justices, saw “no apparent basis for questioning” the state’s participation right (id. at p. 716 (conc. opn. of Kruger, J.)). Second, because Olson disclaimed any personal interest, the court expressly did not decide “whether a PAGA plaintiff has a personal interest that may satisfy the ‘interest’ requirement for intervention under Code of Civil Procedure section 387” (id. at p. 683, fn. 6) — the concurrence flagged the same question as awaiting “another case” (id. at p. 717 (conc. opn. of Kruger, J.)). Third, the court assumed without deciding that overlapping PAGA actions are permissible at all. (Id. at p. 683.) Fourth, it expressed no view on the 2024 amendments (id. at p. 681, fn. 3), which postdate the conduct here and rework the statute’s standing, penalty, and cure provisions. Fifth, it disclaimed any position on whether the procedural problems it cataloged could defeat intervention by a movant who otherwise satisfies section 387 (id. at p. 703, fn. 16), and it declined to pass on Uribe’s correctness (id. at p. 708, fn. 26) or on Accurso, then pending on review (id. at p. 710). The Legislature, the court repeated, “remains free” to confer the very rights it declined to imply. (Id. at p. 716.)