©2024 Seyfarth Shaw LLP www.seyfarth.com 2024 Cal-Peculiarities | 5 creating one-sided rules favoring prevailing plaintiffs, but not prevailing defendants, who seek recovery of attorney fees and costs (see §§ 5.12, 6.13), encouraging wage and hour class actions (see § 5.14), and permitting plaintiffs’ lawyers to obtain private contact information for the defendant’s current and former employees, even when the current plaintiff is not even a member of the proposed class and the lawyers are trolling for new clients, and even if the employees have advised in writing that they don’t want their contact information disclosed (see §§ 4.10, 5.14, 5.15). Immigrant Workers California has taken the lead in protecting undocumented persons against federal immigration-control efforts. Some thus have called California America’s largest “sanctuary state.” In response to the Trump Administration, California enacted the California Values Act, aimed at limiting the extent to which state officials will enforce federal immigration law. California prevents police from asking people about their immigration status or from participating in most federal immigration enforcement actions, limits law enforcement communication with federal immigration authorities, prevents jails from detaining a criminal suspect for federal immigration authorities (unless the person has been convicted of certain crimes), and forbids landlords from reporting the immigration status of their renters. California’s resistance to federal immigration law fully extends to the workplace. California, to protect immigrant workers, makes a plaintiff’s immigrant status irrelevant to employer liability, generally forbids inquiries into a person’s immigration status during a legal proceeding, rejects arguments that its pro-immigrant protections are preempted by the federal Immigration Reform and Control Act, forbids employers from discriminating against employees for updating names and social security numbers, forbids employers from allowing immigration raids at their work sites without a court order, forbids employers from re-verifying employment eligibility of current employees, no longer allows employers to favor job candidates who are not “aliens,” and has purged the Labor Code of the term “alien” (see § 5.17). California has also extended the definition of national origin discrimination to include any adverse action that an employer takes against an individual for holding a special driver’s license that California makes available to those who cannot prove that they are authorized under federal law to work in the United States (see §§ 6.2, 6.6).
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