114 Litigating CA Wage & Hour Class and PAGA Actions (23rd Edition) Seyfarth Shaw LLP | www.seyfarth.com had some merit. The Court of Appeal affirmed this decision, only to be overturned by the California Supreme Court. The Supreme Court rejected the defendant’s arguments that the discovery was overly broad, unduly burdensome, and violated the privacy rights of other employees. According to the Supreme Court, the rules for PAGA discovery are the same as those applied in class actions, where plaintiffs can obtain names and contact information of other potentially aggrieved employees in order to gather information to support their claims. The Supreme Court further reasoned that producing the contact information was not unduly burdensome because the employer maintained the information centrally. Finally, the Supreme Court affirmed prior holdings that courts cannot deny discovery of contact information in a class or representative action. Instead, lower courts should create privacy protections that still allow for discovery of the information, such as by mailing privacy notices to employees and giving them the chance to affirmatively opt out of the disclosure of their contact information. Williams was a huge victory for the plaintiffs’ bar. Plaintiffs’ counsel assert that Williams permits a single plaintiff, who worked in a single position and a single location, to bring PAGA claims on behalf of thousands of employees who performed dozens of different jobs in locations across California. Based on vague allegations of Labor Code violations that the plaintiff claims to have experienced in one specific job and work location, the plaintiff can require the defendant to respond to expensive and burdensome discovery, even where the plaintiff’s allegations might not apply to other categories of workers or to other work locations. And worse yet, because PAGA actions are not subject to class certification requirements, defendants cannot move to deny class certification in an effort to avoid these burdens. One can only hope that the trial courts will be alert to the difficulties of managing these types of overreaching actions and will begin to push back, and eventually impose commonsense limitations on discovery sought in support of such claims.
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