98 Litigating CA Wage & Hour Class and PAGA Actions (23rd Edition) Seyfarth Shaw LLP | www.seyfarth.com certification requirements.468 In so holding, the Court stated that because a PAGA suit is analogous to a suit brought by a government agency on behalf of the public interest, there is no need to satisfy class certification requirements.469 In similar vein, the Court of Appeal recently confirmed that there is no right to a jury trial for PAGA claims, because “PAGA is not a garden variety civil penalty action” and instead “ contains several unique features that … make it unlike any pre-1850 common law action.”470 Indeed, as the PAGA plaintiff stands in for the state, the plaintiff need not bring the action in the jurisdiction where the plaintiff worked or where the employer’s principal place of business is located; rather, the plaintiff can file the lawsuit in any venue where any allegedly aggrieved employee worked.471 Furthermore, as initially drafted, PAGA contained no requirement that the plaintiff exhaust administrative remedies before filing suit. However, PAGA now requires exhaustion of administrative remedies as a result of amendments adopted in August 2004. Seyfarth Shaw has estimated that PAGA created a new right to recover penalties on more than 100 Labor Code provisions, several of which are quite obscure. Even though the limitations period for a penalty claim is only one year,472 the effect of these penalty provisions can be significant. Suppose, for example, that an employer of 150 employees is sued for a repeated violation of some obscure Labor Code section, and the violation affected each employee over the course of one year—during each of 26 biweekly pay periods. In this example, the employer could be subject to penalties of more than $700,000.473 Because employees argue that penalties are cumulative for distinct Labor Code violations, that figure could double or triple 468 Arias, 46 Cal. 4th at 969. 469 Id. at 987. 470 LaFace v. Ralphs Grocery Co., 75 Cal. App. 5th 388, 400 (2022), review denied (May 11, 2022). 471 Crestwood Behavioral Health v. Sup. Ct., 60 Cal. App. 5th 1069 (2021). 472 Code Civ. Proc. § 340(a) (one-year statute of limitations on statutes to recover a penalty); Brown v. Ralph’s Grocery Co., 28 Cal. App. 5th 824, 839 (2018). 473 $15,000 ($100 x 150 employees) for the first pay period and then $30,000 for each of the 25 following pay periods, if the $200 penalty is found to apply for all later pay periods. However, where an employer has a good faith belief that its conduct does not violate the Labor Code, it should be able to demonstrate that the proper penalty is $100 for each pay period, but under that scenario the employer would still be liable for $390,000 ($15,000 x 26 pay periods). See Amaral, 163 Cal. App. 4th at 1209 (“initial” violation encompassed violations covering multiple employees for multiple pay periods, up until such time as “the employer has learned that its conduct violates the Labor Code,” at which point “the employer is on notice that any future violations will be punished just the same as violations that are willful or intentional,” meaning the penalty rate will be doubled).
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTkwMTQ4