Lauren Teukolsky’s “Wage and Hour Case Notes” were published in the July 2022 edition of the California Labor and Employment Review, describing seven new decisions from California and U.S. appellate courts that affect wage and hour law. The column discusses whether trial courts may dismiss PAGA claims on manageability grounds, the proper application of the exclusive concurrent jurisdiction doctrine, a district court’s error in determining whether CAFA jurisdictional threshold was met, the proper application of the “ABC” test in jury instructions, and a good-faith defense to the imposition of waiting time penalties. 

Wage-and-hour law is a dynamic field, with new appellate decisions that regularly reshape the legal landscape.  Ms. Teukolsky is an expert in California wage-and-hour law, and speaks regularly on wage-and-hour topics at national and state conferences.

If you would like to consult with Ms. Teukolsky on a wage-and-hour matter, use this page to get in touch.

On July 18, Lauren Teukolsky spoke on a panel entitled, "Navigating PAGA's Choppy Waters: Viking River Cruises and Other Threats to PAGA."  The panel was presented as part of the Annual Advanced Wage & Hour Seminar put on by the California Lawyers Employment Association (CELA), an organization of more than 1,200 plaintiff-side employment attorneys.  Ms. Teukolsky was joined by Michael Rubin, a partner at Altshuler Berzon in San Francisco, and Mariko Yoshihara, CELA's Legislative Counsel & Policy Director.

The panel discussed the history of the Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA) leading up to the Supreme Court's June 2022 decision in Moriana v Viking River Cruises, the strategy pursued by the plaintiffs' attorneys going into briefing and oral argument, the various aspects of the opinion (including Justice Sotomayor's brilliant concurrence), post-Viking developments, and practical advice for plaintiffs' attorneys facing post-Viking motions to compel arbitration in PAGA cases.  

Ms. Teukolsky has frequently spoken on topics related to PAGA and arbitration, including at the California State Bar's Advanced Wage & Hour Conference and LACBA's Labor & Employment Symposium.  She is available to consult on cases raising complex post-Viking issues and to assist with briefing.  Contact us here if you would like to explore retaining Ms. Teukolsky.

Ms. Teukolsky will speak on a panel for a CELA Webinar on the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Viking River Cruises, Inc. v. Moriana on July 18, 2022, from 12 pm to 1:15 pm. At the webinar, Ms. Teukolsky will unpack the Court’s decision and discuss the decision’s impact on pending and future cases brought under California’s Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA). Ms. Teukolsky will speak alongside co-panelist Michael Rubin of Altshuler Berzon LLP, and the discussion will be moderated by Mariko Yoshihara, CELA Legislative Counsel & Policy Director. To register for the webinar, click here.

Ms. Teukolsky has fought to protect employee’s rights for over 20 years and is a frequent speaker at conferences on topics of employment law and litigation.  She is also frequently cited in news publications for her commentary on developments in the field and was most recently quoted in a June Bloomberg Law article on the Supreme Court’s decision in Viking River. To learn more about Ms. Teukolsky’s experience, click here.
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CELA (California Employment Lawyers Association) is a statewide organization that works to protect and expand the legal rights of workers through litigation, education, and advocacy.

Lauren Teukolsky has been elected a Fellow of the College of Labor and Employment Lawyers, the premier peer-selected organization of labor and employment lawyers in the United States.  She joins 32 other labor and employment attorneys from across the country who were selected to the Fellows Class of 2022. 

The College was established in 1995 through an initiative of the American Bar Association.  According to the College, its purpose is “to promote achievement, advancement, and excellence in the practice of labor and employment law.”  Election as a Fellow is “the highest recognition by one’s colleagues of sustained outstanding performance in the profession, exemplifying integrity, dedication and excellence.”

The process of becoming a Fellow is rigorous. Potential Fellows must first be nominated by two current Fellows in good standing. Nominees are then reviewed and evaluated by Circuit Credentials Committees and the Board of Governors.  Selected nominees are installed as Fellows at the next Annual Meeting of the College.  This year’s installment ceremony will take place in Washington, DC on November 12. 
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Ms. Teukolsky has practiced employment law for over 20 years.  She has dedicated her career to fighting for workers’ rights.  You can read more about her experience here.  

America’s largest tech companies are some of the most profitable and powerful corporations in the world, with values in the hundreds of billions of dollars and in some cases, trillions. Given such size, America’s tech companies, and more specifically, their stances on labor and employment policies, have significant influence over a broad swath of American workers’ lives and wellbeing at the workplace. With 2022 halfway through, Teukolsky Law would like to take a moment to recap some of the most notable labor and employment developments across some of our country’s largest tech companies.  

Amazon: 2022 has been a historic year for Amazon workers. In April, employees at a massive Amazon warehouse in Staten Island voted by a wide margin to form a union, the first successful unionization attempt by Amazon workers in the company’s history. Some commentators viewed the vote as milestone event that might signal a turning point in workers’ organizing efforts against Amazon, a company many union leaders consider a massive threat to labor standards.

Google: In June, Google agreed to pay $118 million to resolve a California state class action brough on behalf of over 15,000 former employees who accused the company of underpaying women. The lawsuit, which was filed in 2017, accused Google of paying women less than men for equal or similar work. The former employees alleged that Google slotted female employees into lower “salary bands” than men, put them in lower-paying positions, and failed to promote them- practices which, according to the former employees, violated California’s equal pay act, Unfair Competition Law, and Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA).

After the settlement was reached, the women involved and their attorneys expressed optimism that the settlement’s provisions will ensure more equity for women at Google.

Microsoft: In January, Microsoft’s board announced that the company had selected a law firm to review its sexual harassment and gender discrimination policies. The announcement came after shareholders expressed concern over how Microsoft and one of its founders, Bill Gates, had treated women employees. The review will produce a report with results of any sexual harassment investigations in recent years against the company’s directors and senior executives.

On the labor front, a group of workers at Activision Blizzard, a large video game company currently being acquired by Microsoft, voted in May to unionize, a first for a major North American video game company. Weeks after the deal, in June, Microsoft reached an agreement with the Communications Workers of America Union to make it easier for Activision Blizzard’s employees to unionize.

Legislation: The first half of 2022 has seen the passage of landmark federal employment legislation. In March, President Biden signed H.R. 4445 into law, preventing employers from using forced arbitration clauses to protect themselves from lawsuits alleging sexual assault and harassment. The law does so by invalidating forced arbitration clauses in “any dispute or claim that arises or accrues” after the date it was signed into law. H.R. 4445 figures to be a significant development for the tech industry, in light of the male-dominant and sexist culture that pervades Silicon Valley.

Powerful state employment legislation was also passed during the first half of 2022. In Washington, Governor Inslee signed the “Silenced No More” act into law in March. The law bars employers from making nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) a condition of employment or settlements and affects some of the largest tech companies in the world, including Amazon and Microsoft. Washington’s law mirrors California’s own Silenced No More act, which already has prompted Salesforce and its subsidiary, Slack, to extend Silenced No More protections to all of their employees across the country.
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If the first half of the year is any indication, 2022 will represent a significant victory for both the labor movement and workers in the tech sector. 

Bloomberg Law published an article on June 15, 2022, about the United States Supreme Court's recent ruling in Viking River Cruises, Inc. v. Moriana. The case centered on California’s Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA), a state labor law that authorized employees to sue over workplace violations in place of the state, even if they had agreed to resolve their disputes through individual arbitration. In an 8-1 decision, the Court limited PAGA’s reach but left the door open for state courts or lawmakers to restore it.

The article states: “The issue of whether PAGA provides for court adjudication of representative claims when an individual has to go to arbitration will come before California courts before state lawmakers have a chance to amend PAGA, said Lauren Teukolsky, an attorney at Teukolsky Law PC who represents workers.

‘PAGA lives to see another day,’ she said.”
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Click here to read the full article on Bloomberg Law’s website.

Last month, the California State Assembly and Senate churned through hundreds of bills in order to meet the “house of origin deadline” – the deadline by which all bills must have passed through their chamber of origin just to have a chance of being signed into law later this year. The bills that passed vary greatly, from bills focused on gun control to bills aimed at enhancing abortion protections. Teukolsky Law would like to take a moment to highlight some of the passed bills that will significantly benefit California’s workers, should they be signed into law later this year.

Senate Bill 1162
SB 1162, the Pay Transparency for Pay Equity Act, aims to improve workplace pay transparency and close the gender and race wage gap by requiring employers with 100 or more employees to publicly report their pay data broken down by race, ethnicity, and sex for both direct employees and employees hired through a third-party staffing agency. The bill would also require employers to provide a salary range on all job postings and promotional opportunities available to all current employees. SB 1162 passed the Senate on a 29-9 vote.

Assembly Bill 1949
AB 1949 would amend the state’s Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA) to require employers to grant their employees at least 5 days of unpaid bereavement leave, or time off for the death or funeral of a family member. AB 1949 passed the Assembly on a 59-9 bipartisan vote.

Senate Bill 836
SB 836 would reinstate a provision that protects a person’s immigration status from disclosure in public court proceedings. This protection ended at the beginning of 2022 and stopped employers from using a worker’s immigration status to deter the worker from bringing legal claims against the employer. SB 836 passed the Senate on a 28-0 vote.
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All three of the above bills are sponsored by the California Employment Lawyers Association (CELA) a statewide organization that works to protect and expand the legal rights of workers through  litigation, education, and advocacy. For a complete list of all bills being tracked by CELA, click here. 

The United States Soccer Federation (U.S. Soccer) and its men’s and women’s national teams agreed to a historic collective bargaining agreement guaranteeing equal pay between the two teams last week. The CBA runs through 2028 and resolves a dispute stretching back to 2016, when members of the U.S. women’s national team filed a complaint with the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging that U.S. Soccer paid the women’s team far less than the men’s team, despite the women’s team consistently outperforming the men’s team on the field. The dispute ended in a $24 million settlement that was to be finalized pending the approval of a new CBA.

The most notable provision of the CBA is the FIFA bonus pool sharing arrangement it incorporates. The arrangement, the first of its kind, will require the men’s and women’s teams to pool together their FIFA World Cup prize money and evenly split their earnings after U.S. soccer claims its portion. The bonus pools of prize money that FIFA awards teams for playing in the World Cup differs greatly between the men and women, with the men’s bonus pool dwarfing that of the women. This meant that, prior to the new CBA, the women’s team could earn much less than the men’s team even when they greatly outperformed them, which has frequently been the case.

The CBA also includes identical performance-based bonuses for the men’s and women’s teams and establishes a revenue sharing model in which both teams’ unions will receive the same cuts of commercial revenue and ticket revenue, among other new provisions.

This historic equal pay victory comes as the California Senate voted 27 to 9 to pass SB 1162, a bill aimed at narrowing the wage gap between men and women that would require companies to disclose salary ranges offered for various positions, make internal promotions available to all employees, and make pay data already reported to the state public over time.  The bill now moves on to the Assembly.
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Teukolsky Law would like to congratulate the women’s national team for their incredible achievements. Hopefully, their brave work and the resulting agreement guaranteeing equal wages will serve as examples for other organizations. 

Earlier this month, a draft majority opinion striking down the landmark decision in Roe v. Wade was leaked to the public, causing widespread fear and leading to protests across the country. Though the draft decision has not yet been finalized, if Roe is struck down when the Supreme Court releases its final decision this summer, the effect would not only be calamitous for women’s reproductive health, but disastrous for American workers as well.

If Roe is overturned, trigger laws in effect across 13 states would ban the procedure almost immediately in those states. An analysis by the Guttmacher Institute suggests that an additional 13 states might quickly follow suit and ban abortions as well. Under these circumstances, many workers would quickly suffer the brutal consequences of a post-Roe America.

Overturning Roe would likely force many workers to travel out of state for abortion care. Workers who previously needed only a day or two of leave will likely need several additional days of leave time to travel out of state.  The federal government does not require employers to provide any paid leave time   to employees, meaning that many workers will not have any paid leave time to seek out-of-state abortion care.  Although the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) guarantees employees the right to take up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for a serious health condition that makes the employee unable to perform her job, it seems unlikely that needing to get an abortion would be covered.  (Ironically, if a woman suffered serious complications from receiving an unsafe abortion, only then would she qualify for FMLA leave.)  And, employers can require employees to provide a doctor’s note certifying the employee’s need to take FMLA leave.  In states where abortion will be illegal, it is unclear how a worker would obtain this documentation. 

The lack of any federal laws guaranteeing leave time—paid or unpaid—means that many workers will have to choose between losing their jobs and being forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy.  Many of these workers will be forced to have children, frequently without concomitant increases in paid leave or paid childcare, given that the US is the only wealthy nation in the world without a national guaranteed paid parental leave program. It is expected that these circumstances will precipitate a drop in women in the workforce, erasing many of the gender pay gap gains abortion protections helped give rise to over the past several decades.

Even though the effects of a post-Roe workplace appear difficult to overcome, there will still be a role for corporations and employers to play to protect their employees. Employers in states that restrict access to reproductive health could add health benefits specifically to cover out of state abortion costs. Corporations such as Tesla, Citigroup, Yelp, Amazon, Apple, and Starbucks all have policies in place or have offered to cover some expenses for employees seeking abortions not offered in their home states. 
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Teukolsky Law stands in solidarity with the workers that will be affected should the Court’s draft opinion become the law of the land. For a list of abortion funds and pro-choice groups to donate to, click here. 

Bloomberg and the Los Angeles Times published articles on April 27, 2022, about tactics Tesla is borrowing from Activision to fight against a race-bias suit. The articles explain how Tesla, the most valuable American car company in the world, is seeking to strengthen its position against racial discrimination claims filed against the corporation by driving a wedge between the two agencies tasked with litigating workplace civil rights cases against it- California’s DFEH, a state regulator, and the EEOC, a federal regulator.

California’s DFEH has earned the reputation as a fervent enforcer of workplace protections, in part due to the state’s more protective employment laws. According to both articles, this reputation has led companies facing large workplace harassment or discrimination suits, such as Activision Blizzard, to attempt to avoid potentially high-dollar state law claims by fighting state regulators and looking for a more favorable deal with the EEOC, a strategy that Tesla appears to have taken as well.

The articles states: “’I can totally see why Tesla would want to take a page from the Activision playbook,’ said Lauren Teukolsky, founder and owner of plaintiffs’ firm Teukolsky Law, who said companies facing multiple lawsuits may look for the best settlement. ‘We now know who the weaker plaintiff is.’”

​Click here to view the Bloomberg article and here to view the Los Angeles Times article.