116 | 2024 Cal-Peculiarities ©2024 Seyfarth Shaw LLP www.seyfarth.com California procedural rules facilitate class actions for violations of wage and hour obligations. Federal wage and hour claims, under the FLSA, require an “opt-in” procedure, meaning that collective actions proceed to the extent that employees want to join the suit.361 California procedural law, however, does not permit opt-in class actions,362 meaning that employees will belong to the class unless they affirmatively opt out. A California plaintiff denied class certification in state court is entitled to an immediate appeal under the “death knell” doctrine, while a plaintiff denied class certification in federal court has no right to appeal until a final judgment, unless the plaintiff can obtain permission to file a discretionary interlocutory appeal.363 California recognizes that plaintiffs’ lawyers have a constitutional right to communicate with potential class members, and requires employers to allow those lawyers to obtain the names and addresses of potential class members, notwithstanding their privacy interests.364 Virtually every Labor Code claim entitles the prevailing plaintiff to attorney fees.365 California has permitted wage and hour claims to proceed under its UCL, which has an extraordinarily long (four-year) statute of limitations.366 California courts show extraordinary deference to plaintiffs’ pleaded allegations. Federal courts require all plaintiffs, including wage and hour plaintiffs, to specify facts to support a plausible claim for relief.367 In California courts, it’s different. The Court of Appeal has stated that, “in the vast majority of wage and hour disputes, class suitability should not be determined on demurrer.”368 California courts, in considering class certification, are not required to use the “rigorous analysis” that the U.S. Supreme Court has required of federal courts.369 Thus, to defeat class certification, California employers often must bear the enormous expense of filing or defeating a motion based on extensive evidence regarding the suitability of the claim for class treatment. Wage and hour plaintiffs thus gain enormous leverage by seeking class treatment, which exponentially magnifies the employer’s potential exposure to monetary liability. A plaintiff seeking class certification need only identify a sufficiently numerous class that has a well-defined community of interest, a concept that embodies three factors: (1) predominant common questions of law or fact, (2) class representatives with claims typical of the class, and (3) class representatives who can adequately represent the class.370 Employers defending class actions often gather declarations from employees to show such things as variations in work experiences – illustrating how class certification would be inappropriate because individual issues would predominate over common issues. One employer, in opposing a motion for class certification, submitted 53 declarations from current and former employees who were putative class members. 371 Many declarants had been summoned, during working hours, to sign their declarations.372 When the plaintiff moved to strike all the declarations, alleging they had been obtained improperly, the trial court denied the motion and then denied class certification.373 Yet the Court of Appeal reversed, holding that the record failed to reflect that the trial court understood its duty to ensure that employee declarations did not result from the employer’s coercion or abuse. If the trial court found that the declarations had been obtained through coercion or abuse, it had broad discretion either to strike the declarations or to discount their evidentiary weight.374 Because the record demonstrated the trial court’s unawareness or misunderstanding of its duty to closely scrutinize the declarations with employer coercion or abuse in mind, its order denying the motions to strike the declarations had to be reversed, as did its ensuing order denying class certification.375 A dissenting justice opined that the majority erred in reaching the evidentiary issue and in treating the trial court’s purported evidentiary error as reversible without determining whether that evidentiary ruling had affected the certification decision.376
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