LOS ANGELES (Legal Newsline) – Judges can decide claims made under California’s Private Attorneys General Act are too broad and throw them out.
A Sept. 9 ruling by the state’s Second Appellate District allows trial judges to strike plaintiffs’ PAGA claims if they decide they won’t be manageable at trial. The ruling came in a PAGA lawsuit brought by a Staples store general manager who sought almost $36 million, alleging he and 345 other current and former Staples GMs weren’t paid overtime or provided rest and meal periods because they were misclassified as executives.
Staples said his lawsuit was unmanageable and violated the company’s due process rights. The appeals court agreed, noting the variance among the tasks of the hundreds of GMs.
It was the first time a California appeals court addressed the issue of manageability at trial.
“Indeed, PAGA claims may well present more significant manageability concerns than those involved in class actions,” Justice Nora Manella wrote. “By its terms, PAGA includes no general requirement similar to the requirement in the class action context, that the plaintiff establish a well-defined community of interest, encompassing a showing that common questions predominate over individual ones.
“Thus, a PAGA claim can cover disparate groups of employees and involve different kinds of violations raising distinct questions.
“Although not addressing the question before us, the California Supreme Court has acknowledged the potential for manageability difficulties in PAGA actions.”
Striking the PAGA claims also does not preclude the individual defendant from continuing to pursue his or her own claims, the decision says.
Staples argued that how GMs spent their time depended on their experience, aptitude and managerial approaches, so there was no manageable way to determine possible damages unless the trial court ran a years-long trial that assessed all 346 GMs.
“The evidence and argument before the trial court revealed no apparent way to litigate Staples’s affirmative defense in a fair and expeditious manner, as the defense turned in large part on GMs’ actual work experience, yet there was extensive variability in the group of Staples’s GMs,” Manella wrote.
When the trial court asked plaintiffs attorneys for a trial plan to deal with the issue, they instead argued the court did not have the authority to strike the claims as unmanageable.