Authored by Simon L. Yang
Seyfarth Synopsis: When the California Supreme Court said no to PAGA waivers in its 2014 Iskanian ruling, we asked whether employers would boldly go where few have gone before and implement arbitration agreements requiring arbitration of PAGA claims. A recent California Court of Appeal decision issued in Perez v. U-Haul Company of California warrants revisiting that question.
Many employers stayed the course in 2014 and continued including PAGA waivers within their arbitration agreements, since numerous federal district courts continued disagreeing with and refusing to apply Iskanian’s logic.
And even when in 2015 the Ninth Circuit instructed federal district courts to apply Iskanian, many employers continued using arbitration agreements with PAGA waivers, since PAGA litigation could be severed and stayed while a plaintiff’s individual claims were arbitrated. If the employer prevailed on the individual claims in arbitration, the plaintiff would not be an aggrieved employee, would not have standing under PAGA, and would thus be unable to pursue mooted PAGA claims.
By 2016 plaintiffs have made the availability of that option scarcer. To avoid having to prove standing by prevailing on their individual claims before pursuing otherwise stayed PAGA claims, plaintiffs now commonly prefer to file PAGA-only lawsuits, without alleging individual claims.
The two putative Perez class representatives, however, had pursued both individual and PAGA claims. Predicting and seeking to avoid a stay of their PAGA claims, the Perez plaintiffs hopped onto the PAGA-only bandwagon by amending their complaints to allege a PAGA cause of action only—abandoning their individual claims, their roles as potential class representatives, and putative class members’ individual rights.
U-Haul fought back and sought to require arbitration of the predicate issue of whether the plaintiffs themselves had been subject to any Labor Code violations. Even though U-Haul was not seeking to preclude the PAGA cause of action but only to arbitrate the individual issues determinative of plaintiffs’ standing for their PAGA claims, the Court of Appeal rejected U-Haul’s argument. It reasoned that no individual issues remained at issue and that U-Haul’s arbitration agreement explicitly precluded arbitration of any representative issues.
Though Iskanian explicitly acknowledged that PAGA claims might be arbitrated, the Perez court then went full dictum. It opined that even if U-Haul’s arbitration agreement did not preclude its argument for arbitrating the plaintiff-specific issues determinative of PAGA standing, the PAGA cause of action could not be split between arbitration and litigation. But Iskanian doesn’t preclude this. What it precluded was the waiver of the right to pursue PAGA claims at all.
While it may be the case that an arbitration agreement cannot specify that an individual claim be created in a PAGA-only lawsuit, an arbitration agreement should be able to specify that representative claims be arbitrated—and specify that streamlined procedures be applied. Once again, will some enterprising employers consider going boldly where few have gone before?