©2025 Seyfarth Shaw LLP www.seyfarth.com 2025 Cal-Peculiarities | 131 Seeking penalties for Labor Code violations the plaintiffs themselves never experienced. A Court of Appeal decision permitted a security guard affected by only one Labor Code violation to assert PAGA claims on behalf of aggrieved employees for other Labor Code violations, even though the violations did not personally affect the plaintiff. The Court of Appeal acknowledged that this result conflicts with traditional rules of standing, but reasoned that those rules do not apply to a PAGA case, where the plaintiff is acting on behalf of the California Labor Commissioner.512 The 2024 reforms ended this, requiring that a plaintiff must experience the Labor Code violations he or she is seeking to pursue on a representative basis.513 Private suits for statutory penalties for untimely payment of wages and equal pay. A 2019 amendment makes claims for untimely payment of wages even more lucrative. The old law provided no private right to sue for untimely wage payments during employment: only the Labor Commissioner or a PAGA plaintiff could sue, for civil penalties, and those penalties went exclusively or mostly to the State of California. Accordingly, employees experiencing untimely payment of wages now can choose to seek either (1) civil penalties under PAGA (which would be split between the LWDA and aggrieved employees) or (2) statutory penalties (going entirely to the employees).514 This 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 35% 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.515 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 at trial and 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.”516 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.”517 But 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.”518 In reading “medical” into the statute, the Supreme Court reversed a
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