Bay Area Employment Law Blog

To paraphrase Mr. Miyagi from the (original) "Karate Kid", work activities that are entirely exempt are okay; those that are entirely non-exempt are okay; but those that straddle the fence will likely get employers squished, just like grapes. In Heyen v. Safeway,...

Continuing to crack down on overtime class actions, a California appellate court has ruled that random employee sampling cannot establish cases as class actions if the entire class of employees is not provably similar. In Dailey v. Sears, Roebuck and Co., a group of...

Employers cannot reflexively fire working mothers who exhaust the four months of leave they are entitled to under California's Pregnancy Disability Leave Law ("PDLL"). Even if they have used all their PDLL leave, mothers can still be entitled to additional time off as...

Further muddying the issue of "mixed motives" in employment discrimination, the California Supreme Court ruled that, when employees are fired for both lawful and unlawful reasons (i.e., with mixed motives), they can seek injunctions and recover attorneys' fees but not...

In McGrory v. Applied Signal Technology, a California appellate court held that an employer was justified in firing an employee who refused to participate in an investigation of alleged workplace harassment. The long-time employee, who apparently had an excellent work...

Following California law on mandatory arbitration of employment claims is a little like watching a tennis match; rulings keep going back and forth between employers and employees. The latest in the ongoing volley, Franco v. Arakelian Enterprises, Inc., is clearly a...

Using what a judge described as a "novel and unprecedented" approach, an employee in Southern California invoked a relatively obscure law created to redress race violence to recover almost $600,000 in damages and fees for sex harassment.  The case of Ventura v. ABM...

A California appellate court ruled that an employee who misled her employer into thinking she had signed an arbitration agreement could still refuse to arbitrate because she never signed. In Gorlach v. The Sports Club Company, the employee, a former Human Resources...

Despite recent rulings from the Supreme Court, employee arbitration agreements might not be as rock-solid as some employers believe. In Elijahjuan v. Superior Court (Mike Campbell & Associates), a California appellate court held that a narrowly-tailored...

That's the bad news. The only good news is, the employees who lost the case of Aleman v. AirTouch Cellular will likely have to pay less than the $140,000 each that the trial court originally ordered them to pay. In 2007, a group of employees, including Daniel Krofta...