Labor & Employment Law Blog

As we previously reported here, on April 26, 2010, in Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., a divided Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided 6-5 en banc to affirm the decision of the trial court to grant class certification in a discrimination lawsuit alleging Wal-Mart Stores discriminates against its women employees. The nationwide class is reputed by the Los Angeles Daily Journal to number upward of 1.6 million ...

In defending numerous wage and hour class action lawsuits, one thing is constant. Such lawsuits nearly always include allegations that the employer failed to provide employees with wage statements (aka check stubs) that comply with Labor Code section 226, which specifies nine items of information that must be stated on each wage statement. Such allegations take one or both of the following forms ...

Employers are frequently presented with or learn second-hand about complaints by employees ranging from the trivial to serious.  An employer's response to such complaints or to second-hand reports of workplace harassment, discrimination, and/or retaliation can help reduce or eliminate liability on the part of the employer or even create liability on the part of the employer. 

In 2010, former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed nine out of the eleven employment-related bills we were tracking that made it to his desk for approval. Among the vetoed legislation were bills: limiting the use of credit checks in employee background checks, requiring employers to provide unpaid bereavement leave, increasing damages in minimum wage actions, increasing penalties for failure to pay final wages actions, and removing overtime and meal period exemptions for certain agricultural employees.

AALRR attorney Thomas Lenz was quoted by the Riverside Press-Enterprise on December 23, 2010, in an article on labor negotiations.

In Futrell v. Payday California, Inc., et al., a class action case involving overtime claims against a payroll company that prepared and issued plaintiff’s paychecks, W-2’s and related documents, the California Court of Appeal affirmed the trial court's grant of summary judgment dismissing the plaintiff’s action against the payroll company on grounds that the payroll company was not the plaintiff’s “employer.”

On December 9, 2010, the California Second District Court of Appeal upheld the dismissal of a lawsuit brought by a United Parcel Service supervisor for unpaid overtime and missed meal and rest breaks, on the ground that he was employed in an exempt position under California law. The court in Taylor v. UPS held that both the executive and administrative exemptions applied, since the supervisor was primarily engaged in management-related duties which qualified for application of each of the exemptions.

As we previously reported here, in Alcazar, et al. v. The Corporation Of The Catholic Archbishop of Seattle, et al., the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that a Catholic seminarian's claims against his church for allegedly unpaid wages brought under a Washington state minimum wage statute is barred as a matter of law by the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the United ...

On May 21, 2008, President George W. Bush signed the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008 (“GINA”) into law, which prohibits the use of genetic information in the employment context, restricts employers and other entities covered by Title II from requesting, requiring, or purchasing genetic information, and strictly limits such entities from disclosing such information. GINA took effect on November 21, 2009.