Labor & Employment

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

An employer must provide an employee a seat if the nature of the employee’s tasks at that location, objectively viewed in light of all the circumstances, reasonably permit sitting and sitting would not interfere with tasks that require standing at that location. Read More

In this mixed-motive wrongful termination case, the trial court did not err in giving a jury instruction that required the plaintiff to prove that the forbidden motive was "a substantial motivating reason" for the termination.  Read More

The EEOC is not required to conciliate with an employer on behalf of individual employees before bringing suit on behalf of a class of employees, but may conciliate on behalf of the class and then join to the suit particular individuals who fall within the specified class.  Read More