Labor & Employment

Plaintiff’s one-year limitations period for bringing suit after the California Department of Fair Employment & Housing issued a right-to-sue letter should be equitably tolled for a year beyond the EEOC’s issuance of its own right-to-sue  letter, because plaintiff reasonably relied on the DFEH letter’s incorrect statement that the limitations period would be tolled while EEOC investigated the claim.  Read More

A district court scheduling order was not an appealable order since it did not finally decide the dispositive issue of whether to compel arbitration.  Read More

In this wage and hour dispute, defendant was not entitled to a writ of mandate to overturn a district court scheduling order setting trial on the issue of whether plaintiff’s contracts were employment agreements in interstate commerce and thus exempt from the Federal Arbitration Act, since defendant has an adequate remedy on appeal from any order denying its motion to… Read More

Triable fact issues remain as to whether government entity running fair and exhibition grounds fits within the Fair Labor Standards Act’s amusement and recreation establishment exception to overtime pay requirements.  Read More

Plaintiff’s prima facie claim for disability discrimination against her labor union does not necessarily require a showing that the union breached its duty of fair representation.  Read More

The federal National Labor Relations Act did not preempt plaintiff Walmart’s state law trespass claim, which sought redress for defendant union’s in-store “flash mob” protest strategy.  Read More

Despite the fact that plaintiff employee had no actual disability, her employer had a statutory duty to accommodate what it perceived to be her disability; consequently, triable issues of fact exist on plaintiff’s claim that her employment was terminated for an impermissible reason.  Read More

The Labor Department’s regulation reversing, without explanation, decades of treating service advisors as exempt salesmen under the Fair Labor Standards Act is not entitled to judicial deference.  Read More

Whether commission-paid employees were required to perform tasks not directly involved in selling, in violation of California’s minimum wage laws, was a common question permitting class certification. Read More

Plaintiff who took a medical leave of absence from her full-time job and, upon her return, was offered only part-time work, could not show that the employer’s legitimate business reason for not offering full-time work was pretextual.  Read More

Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, a worker’s regular rate of pay, used to compute overtime pay, includes any compensation paid even if it is not paid on an hourly basis; so payments to employees in lieu of medical insurance benefits should have been included in their regular rate of pay, for purposes of computing their overtime pay.  Read More

A discriminatory constructive discharge from employment claim accrues on the employee’s resignation, not on the earlier date of the employer’s last discriminatory act.  Read More

Arbitrators’ award holding defendant bound by a collective bargaining agreement as a member of the multi-employer bargaining unit should have been confirmed despite court’s finding arbitrators’ construction of the agreement “implausible” and despite argument it violated public policy.  Read More

Labor Code 1164.9 ,which attempts to divest California superior courts of jurisdiction to review certain Agricultural Labor Relations Board decisions, is unconstitutional.  Read More

The actual facts, not the claimant’s allegations, determine whether an action arose from conduct in the course of employment for purposes of determining whether a governmental entity must reimburse its employee for cost incurred in defending the claimant’s suit.  Read More

Under the FLSA, an employer may round work start and stop times to the nearest 15 minutes, if the rounding does not decrease work time considering all workers over an extended period; also, another practice that deprived plaintiff, alone, of one minute of work time was a de minimis violation for which the FLSA provided no remedy. Read More

Whether the burden on the employer of allowing two 10-minute rest breaks in the middle of the work periods before and after the meal break justified the employer’s practice of allowing only one 20-minute rest break before the meal break was a disputed factual issue precluding summary judgment.  Read More

Plaintiff who took a medical leave of absence from her full-time job and, upon her return, was offered only part-time work, could not show that the employer's legitimate business reason for not offering full-time work was pretextual.  Read More

A letter from a state-level fire department supervisor to a county-level fire supervisor asking that plaintiff not be assigned any duty that brought him on state fire department premises was not protected speech under the Anti-SLAPP statute, and in fact it breached a settlement agreement under which plaintiff had voluntarily resigned rather than face charges of sexual assault.  Read More

There was sufficient evidence to support a violation of the Fair Employment and Housing Act’s prohibition of discrimination against a person based on his association with a disabled person, when an employee's new boss purposefully scheduled him to drive later-than-usual truck routes so as to prevent him from being able to administer dialysis to his son, thus ridding the company… Read More