Seyfarth Synopsis: The Second District Court of Appeal held that, under the pre-reform PAGA statute, an individual employee need not have been employed or experienced a Labor Code violation during the one-year PAGA limitations period to have standing to assert a PAGA claim.
In Osuna, the plaintiff submitted a PAGA notice to the Labor Workforce and Development Agency more than one year after the conclusion of his employment. Because the plaintiff was not employed during the PAGA period, he could not have experienced any Labor Code violations during the one-year PAGA limitations periods. The trial court sustained the employer's demurrer to the employee's PAGA claim, reasoning that it was untimely under the one-year limitations period applicable to actions to recover statutory penalties in Code of Civil Procedure section 340(a).
The Second District reversed, holding that the trial court had improperly grafted the statute of limitations onto PAGA's standing requirements, which the Second District found to be distinct. According to the Second District, the only standing requirement PAGA imposes is that the plaintiff have been employed by the alleged violator and experienced one or more of the violations alleged in the Complaint. The Second District concluded there is no temporal component to these requirements and the fact that a PAGA's plaintiff's employment ceased years or even decades before they file suit is irrelevant. The Second District did not grapple with the difficult issues raised by its decision, such as how a Court is supposed to decide whether a PAGA plaintiff experienced a Labor Code violation that allegedly occurred decades prior to the filing of the lawsuit.
Fortunately for employers, the relevance of Osuna should be short-lived. The recent amendments to PAGA, which apply to all actions filed after June 19, 2024, expressly confirm that a PAGA plaintiff must have experienced a Labor Code violation within the one year prior to their submitting a PAGA notice to the LWDA. The reasoning of Osuna is also in tension with another recent Second District decision, Williams v. Alacrity Solutions Group, LLC, in which a different division of the Second District held that a PAGA claim must be brought within one year of the last Labor Code violation personally experienced by the named plaintiff to be viable. Pending a decision by the California Supreme Court resolving this dispute, employers can argue in trial courts that Williams is the better-reasoned decision and should be followed over Osuna.
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