Cal-Peculiarities: How California Employment Law is Different 2022 Edition

126 | 2022 Cal-Peculiarities ©2022 Seyfarth Shaw LLP  www.seyfarth.com penalties (going entirely to the employees) . 449 T his private right to sue for statutory penalties also applies to violations of the California Equal Pay Act. If an affected employee sues, then the Labor Commission could not bring an independent action. PAGA pirates must share their booty. The Court of Appeal has held that a prevailing PAGA plaintiff must share with the other aggrieved employees the 25% portion of civil penalties that PAGA designates for aggrieved employees. The Court of Appeal thus upheld a trial court that denied the plaintiff a default PAGA judgment because he proposed to have all 25% of the civil penalties go to him instead of it being shared with his 22 fellow aggrieved employees. The case was dismissed when the plaintiff persisted in refusing to share . 450 No right to a PAGA jury trial. Parties have hotly contested whether there is a right to jury trial in PAGA actions. Although PAGA itself does not call for a jury trial, the California Constitution arguably does. Often, but not always, it has been the plaintiff who desires a jury trial. The first appellate decision on this issue occurred in 2022. In that case the plaintiff lost a trial and then took an appeal from the trial judge’s denial of the plaintiffs’ request for a jury trial. The Court of Appeal, in affirming the judgment against the plaintiff, held: “On balance, we cannot conclude that such an action [under PAGA] has a pre-1850 common law analog that would call for the right to a jury trial under the California Constitution. ” 451 5.16 “The Life Unlitigated is Not Worth Living” This Californicated paraphrase of Socratic wisdom is not exactly public policy in California, but sometimes it sure seems that way. 5.16.1 Limited Good Samaritan protection Like many states, California has a Good Samaritan statute, designed to encourage people to assist victims of dire emergencies. The statute exists because the common law, while imposing no duty on a person to come to a victim’s aid, does require due care of a person who chooses to administer aid. To encourage helping behavior by people who would be inclined to act as Good Samaritans but for this fear of common-law liability, the California Legislature enacted a statute that gave immunity from liability to “any person … who renders emergency care at the scene of an emergency. ” 452 B ut then the California Supreme Court, acting in its historical tradition of expanding liability at every opportunity, held in a 2008 decision that Good Samaritan protection was limited to those who provided “emergency medical care. ” 453 I n reading “medical” into the statute, the Supreme Court reversed a summary judgment in favor of a defendant who had removed her friend from a wrecked automobile immediately following an accident, inadvertently aggravating the friend’s spinal injuries in the process. The dissenting opinion in this 4-3 decision pointed out that the majority’s rewriting of the Good Samaritan statute—immunizing only medical assistance—would legally jeopardize all rescue and transportation efforts, so that a person would be at legal risk while pulling a victim from a burning building and would be legally protected only while administering CPR to the victim on the sidewalk. The dissent doubted that the Legislature intended “results so illogical, and so at odds with the clear statutory language. ” 454 T he dissent was right: the Legislature responded by amending the statute to include both “medical” and “non-medical” emergency car e. 455 5.16.2 Encouragement of multiple claims California judges practically encourage plaintiffs’ attorneys to assert all claims possible. The California Supreme Court has stated, “A responsible attorney handling an employment discrimination case must plead a variety of statutory, tort and contract causes of action in order to fully protect the interests of his or her client. ” 456 Plaintiff’s attorneys can thus feel obliged to bring many claims, lest their clients second-guess their judgment by citing the high court’s wisdom.