Articles Discussing General Workplace Issues in California.

California keeps making privacy headlines for its trailblazing California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”), set to take effect January 1, 2020, but there is another set of privacy bills making its way through the California state legislature, that, if passed, will provide consumers with further privacy protections.

California employers were dealt another setback in the responding to claims of misclassification of independent contractor status for violations of the Industrial Welfare Commission Wage Order (“IWC Wage Orders”). Noting California’s “basic legal tradition” that “judicial decisions are given retroactive effect,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has held that the State’s recently-adopted “ABC” test, used in the employee-versus-independent contractor analysis in cases involving IWC Wage Orders, must be applied retroactively.

Executive Summary: In 2018, the California Supreme Court adopted the “ABC test” for determining whether workers are independent contractors under California wage orders (the Dynamex decision). For a discussion of that decision, please see our May 3, 2018 Alert. The ABC test makes it more difficult in many cases for companies to classify a worker as an independent contractor than under the prior generally-applied common law test. As such, the adoption of the ABC test increases many California employers’ exposure for minimum wage, overtime, meal and rest periods, and other benefits owed to employees but not to independent contractors. On May 2, 2019, in Vasquez v. Jan-Pro Franchising International, Inc., the Ninth Circuit concluded that the ABC test should be applied retroactively to situations that arose before the Dynamex decision came out.

Despite its name, the California Consumer Privacy Act, which goes into effect Jan. 1, 2020, potentially could impose substantial compliance burdens on and create significant class-action exposure for every employer that employs California residents and has more than $25 million in annual gross revenues.

The Labor Commissioner fined a Southern-California car wash for more than $2.36 million for alleged wage and hour violations. These fines included both civil penalties and wages owed to employees. This appears to be a continuation of the agency’s enforcement actions against commercial car washes from 2012 and 2015.

How will the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA) apply to us? This is a question 0rganizations have asked since the CCPA was first proposed. There remains a number of important questions about the scope of the Golden State’s sweeping privacy law that still need to be answered.

As we reported, in late February, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra and Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson introduced Senate Bill 561, legislation intended to strengthen and clarify the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

On April 15, 2019, a California Court of Appeal affirmed summary judgment for the employer in an action alleging class-wide violations of the hyper-technical provisions of the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA).1 Following just shortly after the Ninth Circuit’s pro-employee opinion in a similar case, Gilberg v. California Check Cashing Stores, the court’s opinion is a welcome development for embattled employers in California.2

On March 26, 2019, proposed Assembly Bill 5, which would codify the California Supreme Court’s controversial Dynamex decision, was amended to exempt certain types of licensed workers. Just as noteworthy as the types of workers identified as exempt from the standard are the types of employees who were not identified. For example, the exemption does not appear to cover trucking companies and gig economy transportation companies. If there are specific statutory exclusions, it will be difficult for courts to find exclusions in the common law.

On February 7, 2019, the California Supreme Court determined that an employee cannot sue a payroll company for breach of contract under the third party beneficiary doctrine, and that it is inappropriate to impose a tort duty of care upon a payroll company with regards to the obligations owed to an employee under the applicable labor statutes and wage orders.

If your business has five or more employees, your business is one of the millions in California that has a duty to provide reasonable accommodations for its employees with known disabilities.

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which goes into effect January 1, 2020, is considered the most expansive state privacy law in the United States. Organizations familiar with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which became effective on May 25, 2018, certainly will understand CCPA’s implications. Perhaps the best known comprehensive privacy and security regime globally, GDPR solidified and expanded a prior set of guidelines/directives and granted individuals certain rights with respect to their personal data. The CCPA seems to have spurred a flood of similar legislative proposals on the state level.

California employment law is changing once again. By January 1, 2020, an employer having five or more employees will be required to provide at least one hour of sexual harassment training to all of its employees, once every two years. The training will be required to start within six months of the employee’s assumption of a position.

Bruce Sarchet and Corinn Jackson with Littler’s Workplace Policy Institute review the key labor and employment measures introduced this year in the California legislature. Lawmakers have filed bills on a wide range of topics, from independent contractor classification to hairstyle discrimination – and beyond! Bruce and Corinn break down the most significant pending bills, identifying practical ramifications for employers and offering insights into the legislative history and process.

By now, most employers should be aware of the California Healthy Workplaces, Healthy Family Act which went into effect in 2015. Under California law, all employers (with very few exceptions), must allow employees to use up to 3 days or 24 hours of paid sick leave in a 12-month period. However, what many employers do not know is that several cities within the State of California have their own paid sick leave requirements, many of them more stringent than those required under the state law.