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Tony Oncidi

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Anthony J. Oncidi is the Co-Chair Emeritus of the Labor & Employment Law Department and heads the West Coast Labor & Employment group in the firm’s Los Angeles office.

Tony represents employers and management in all aspects of labor relations and employment law, including litigation and preventive counseling, wage and hour matters, including class actions, wrongful termination, employee discipline, Title VII and the California Fair Employment and Housing Act, executive employment contract disputes, sexual harassment training and investigations, workplace violence, drug testing and privacy issues, Sarbanes-Oxley claims and employee raiding and trade secret protection. A substantial portion of Tony’s practice involves the defense of employers in large class actions, employment discrimination, harassment and wrongful termination litigation in state and federal court as well as arbitration proceedings, including FINRA matters.

Tony is recognized as a leading lawyer by such highly respected publications and organizations as the Los Angeles Daily Journal, The Hollywood Reporter, and Chambers USA, which gives him the highest possible rating (“Band 1”) for Labor & Employment.  According to Chambers USA, clients say Tony is "brilliant at what he does… He is even keeled, has a high emotional IQ, is a great legal writer and orator, and never gives up." Other clients report:  “Tony has an outstanding reputation” and he is “smart, cost effective and appropriately aggressive.” Tony is hailed as "outstanding,” particularly for his “ability to merge top-shelf lawyerly advice with pragmatic business acumen.” He is highly respected in the industry, with other commentators lauding him as a "phenomenal strategist" and "one of the top employment litigators in the country."

“Tony is the author of the treatise titled Employment Discrimination Depositions (Juris Pub’g 2020; www.jurispub.com), co-author of Proskauer on Privacy (PLI 2020), and, since 1990, has been a regular columnist for the official publication of the Labor and Employment Law Section of the State Bar of California and the Los Angeles Daily Journal.

Tony has been a featured guest on Fox 11 News and CBS News in Los Angeles. He has been interviewed and quoted by leading national media outlets such as The National Law Journal, Bloomberg News, The New York Times, and Newsweek and Time magazines. Tony is a frequent speaker on employment law topics for large and small groups of employers and their counsel, including the Society for Human Resource Management ("SHRM"), PIHRA, the National CLE Conference, National Business Institute, the Employment Round Table of Southern California (Board Member), the Council on Education in Management, the Institute for Corporate Counsel, the State Bar of California, the California Continuing Education of the Bar Program and the Los Angeles and Beverly Hills Bar Associations. He has testified as an expert witness regarding wage and hour issues as well as the California Fair Employment and Housing Act and has served as a faculty member of the National Employment Law Institute. He has served as an arbitrator in an employment discrimination matter.

Tony is an appointed Hearing Examiner for the Los Angeles Police Commission Board of Rights and has served as an Adjunct Professor of Law and a guest lecturer at USC Law School and a guest lecturer at UCLA Law School.

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Wawrzenski v. United Airlines, Inc., 2024 WL 4750558 (Cal. Ct. App. 2024)

Alexa Wawrzenski was fired from her position as a United Airlines flight attendant for having a social media account featuring pictures of herself in uniform and wearing a bikini, with a link to an OnlyFans subscription-based account that she advertised as providing “exclusive private content you won’t see anywhere else.” Wawrzenski sued…

Miller v. California Dep’t of Corr. & Rehab., 105 Cal. App. 5th 261 (2024)

Maria Miller worked as a correctional officer at the California Institute for Women before she was injured in a slip-and-fall accident in 2016. After Miller had exhausted her workers’ compensation wage replacement benefits in 2018, the Department placed her on an unpaid leave of absence. When the Department subsequently…

Liu v. Miniso Depot, Inc., 105 Cal. App. 5th 791 (2024)

Youngtong “Jade” Liu sued her former employer, Miniso Depot, Inc., for various wage and hour violations of the California Labor Code and the California Code of Regulations; sex discrimination; sexual orientation/gender identity harassment and discrimination in violation of the Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA); retaliation in violation of the whistleblower statute…

Kim v. Uber Techs., Inc., 105 Cal. App. 5th 252 (2024)

This lawsuit arose out of a traffic accident that occurred at 2:28 a.m. when an off-duty Uber driver hit Mackenzie Young Jay Kim, the pedestrian plaintiff in the case. The undisputed facts established that the driver went to “offline status” at 2:24 a.m. at a location in West Los Angeles that was…

The California Labor Workforce Development Agency (LWDA) recently refreshed its Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) regarding Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA) claims processing in light of the recent legislative reforms.

As we reported here, California enacted A.B. 2288 and S.B. 92 this past summer, bringing long-overdue reforms to PAGA.  The new legislation applies to PAGA notices and any resulting actions filed on or after June…

Labor Co-Chair Tony Oncidi joins Bloomberg Law podcast host June Grasso to discuss the five employment law cases currently pending before the US Supreme Court.  Those cases involve issues ranging from a heterosexual employee’s claim that she was discriminated against because of her sexual orientation and a terminated employee’s RICO claim against a cannabis company that mislabeled its “elixir” and caused the employee to fail a…

Unbowed and unbroken, California continues to work toward creating that Workers’ Paradise in the Sun, and this legislative session did not disappoint!  Here are the latest new laws that will take effect by the first of the year:

LawSummary & Impact on Employers
AB 1815

Weber (D-San Diego)		Expansion of the CROWN Act.  The Fair Employment and Housing Act (“FEHA”) already defines the
…

It’s not like we didn’t tell you so, cuz we did!  Just last year, we predicted that the latest assault on employer arbitration rights had the potential to destroy arbitration everywhere in the country. Is Arbitration Becoming “Just Somebody That We Used to Know”? Well, it’s happening, and the most recent salvo (not surprisingly) comes from the Golden State.

On Monday, a California appellate court…

Kennedy v. Las Vegas Sands Corp., 110 F.4th 1136 (9th Cir. 2024)

Sean Kennedy and the other plaintiffs worked as full-time corporate jet pilots for defendants.  The pilots were paid between $125,000 and $160,000 annually.  After an eight-day bench trial, the district court ordered judgment in favor of the employers on the ground that the pilots qualified as highly compensated exempt employees…