California Employment Law Notes

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Morgan v. United Retail Inc., 186 Cal. App. 4th 1136 (2010)

Amber Morgan filed this class action lawsuit against her former employer under Cal. Lab. Code § 226, alleging United Retail had violated the law because the wage statements issued by the employer listed the total number of regular hours and overtime hours separately and did not provide the sum of the regular and overtime hours as a separate line item. During her deposition, Morgan testified she was injured by United Retail’s failure to include an additional line item showing the sum of hours worked because “[i]t makes it a little difficult to count how many hours I have been working.”

Lu v. Hawaiian Gardens Casino, Inc., 2010 WL 3081272 (Cal. S. Ct. 2010)

Louie Hung Kwei Lu, a card dealer at Hawaiian Gardens Casino, filed this class action challenging the casino’s tip-pooling policy that required dealers to set aside 15 to 20 percent of the tips they received, which the casino distributed to other employees who provided service to casino customers. The Supreme Court…

Silguero v. Creteguard, Inc., 187 Cal. App. 4th 60 (2010)

Shortly after Creteguard hired Rosemary Silguero, her former employer (FST) contacted Creteguard and “requested the cooperation and participation of [Creteguard] in enforcing the confidentiality agreement [between Silguero and FST], including those provisions prohibiting Silguero from all sales activities for 18 months following Silguero’s departure or termination from FST.” In response to the letter…

Hawn v. Executive Jet Mgmt., Inc., 621 F.3d 991 (2010)

Gregory Hawn, Michael Prince and Aric Aldrich (all pilots) were terminated by Executive Jet Management after a female flight attendant, Robin McCrea, alleged they had sexually harassed her and created a hostile work environment involving an array of conduct including sexualized banter, crude jokes and the sharing of crude and/or pornographic emails and websites.…

Milan v. City of Holtville, 186 Cal. App. 4th 1028 (2010)

Tanya Milan, who worked as a water treatment operator for the City of Holtville, was injured on the job while moving a large piece of metal. After Milan applied for workers’ compensation benefits, a physician who had been retained on behalf of the city, examined her and concluded she would not be able to return to work at the water treatment plant. Shortly thereafter, the city notified Milan that because she would be unable to return to work, it had decided to offer her rehabilitation benefits, which she accepted before taking an online real estate course. Milan continued to receive a regular paycheck from the city until she was notified 18 months after the injury had occurred that the city was terminating her employment. Milan filed this lawsuit against the city, alleging it had violated the Fair Employment and Housing Act by failing to determine whether it could provide effective accommodations for her disability.

Thompson v. City of Monrovia, 186 Cal. App. 4th 860 (2010)

Officer Matthew Donald Thompson sued the Monrovia Police Department for harassment and a hostile work environment arising from offensive remarks and behavior that were allegedly directed at an African-American colleague. Thompson also alleged he suffered retaliation for having reported the racism. The trial court granted summary judgment to the police department, and the…

City of Ontario v. Quon, 130 S. Ct. 2619 (2010)

The City of Ontario’s Computer Usage, Internet and E-mail Policy provides that use of the city’s computers and other electronic equipment, networks, etc., is limited to city-related business, that access is not confidential and “users should have no expectation of privacy or confidentiality when using these resources.” Sergeant Jeff Quon, a member of the city’s SWAT team, signed an employee acknowledgement of the Policy and attended a meeting in which he and others were informed that text messages were considered to be the same as e-mail and could be audited by the department. However, Quon was later told that the content of his text messages would not be audited so long as he paid the department for any charges associated with texting more than 25,000 characters in a billing cycle. When a lieutenant in the department “grew weary” of being a bill collector for officers who exceeded the 25,000 character limit, the department contacted Arch Wireless and requested transcripts of the text messages. After the department received the transcripts from Arch, internal affairs conducted an investigation to determine “if someone was wasting city time not doing work when they should be.” The investigation revealed that many of Quon’s messages were personal in nature and sexually explicit.

 Lewis v. City of Chicago, 560 U.S. ___, 130 S. Ct. 2191 (2010)

Plaintiffs in this case (more than 6,000 African-Americans) had applied to serve in the Chicago Fire Department. They challenged as discriminatory the city’s decision to hire only applicants who had scored 89 or above on a written examination. The city stipulated that the 89-point cutoff had a “severe disparate impact against African Americans,” but argued that the cutoff score was justified by business necessity. Although plaintiffs won at the district court level, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the judgment on the ground that plaintiffs’ suit was untimely because the earliest EEOC charge was filed more than 300 days after the only discriminatory act – sorting the scores into the “well-qualified,” “qualified” and “not-qualified” categories.

 Hernandez v. Tanninen, 604 F.3d 1095 (9th Cir. 2010)

Rolando Hernandez alleged claims of race and national origin discrimination based on disparate treatment, retaliation, and a hostile work environment while he was employed as a mechanic in the Fire Shop of the City of Vancouver, Washington. Hernandez sued the city and another employee, Mark Tanninen. Hernandez was initially represented by attorney Gregory Ferguson. Hernandez told Ferguson that Tanninen had witnessed the discrimination and would corroborate his story. Ferguson interviewed Tanninen, who did initially corroborate Hernandez’s story, but after speaking with the Deputy Fire Chief, Tanninen decided his getting involved would not be good for the Deputy Fire Chief and “everyone involved.” Since Ferguson was a witness to Tanninen’s original statements corroborating the allegations, Ferguson referred the case to another attorney.

 Bowman v. Wyatt, 186 Cal.App.4th 286 (2010)

Plaintiff Barry A. Bowman filed this case after suffering devastating injuries when his motorcycle collided with a dump truck owned and operated by Tommie Wyatt, Jr. The collision occurred shortly after Wyatt had delivered a load of asphalt to a work site of the City of Los Angeles with which Wyatt was under contract. The jury found that Wyatt was an employee of the city and returned a verdict in Bowman’s favor in the amount of $15.7 million. On appeal, the city argued that the trial court had misinstructed the jury on the factors it should consider in determining whether Wyatt was an employee or independent contractor of the city.