Johnson v. Lowe’s Home Centers, LLC, 93 F.4th 459 (9th Cir. 2024)

The Ninth Circuit vacated a district court’s dismissal of a former employee’s “non-individual” Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA) claims in the wake of the California Supreme Court’s holding in Adolph v. Uber Techs., Inc., 14 Cal. 5th 1104 (2023). Plaintiff in this case signed a contract with her employer (Lowe’s) that contained an arbitration agreement for claims arising from her employment. After her termination, she filed a complaint in California state court (later removed to federal court), asserting both individual and representative claims under PAGA. Lowe’s successfully moved to arbitrate the individual PAGA claims following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Viking River Cruises, Inc. v. Moriana, 596 U.S. 639 (2022), which held that the Federal Arbitration Act preempts PAGA’s mandatory joinder rule and allows for an employer to compel individual PAGA claims to arbitration.

The district court then dismissed the representative claims, citing the majority opinion in Viking River: “PAGA provides no mechanism to enable a court to adjudicate non-individual PAGA claims once an individual claim has been committed to a separate [arbitration] proceeding.” However, a year after Viking River (and before the Ninth Circuit heard oral argument in this case), the California Supreme Court held in Adolph that “an order compelling arbitration of individual claims does not strip the plaintiff of standing to litigate non-individual claims in court.”