While Zakaryan v. Men's Warehouse, Inc., ___ Cal.App.5th ___ (Mar. 28, 2019), is primarily an arbitration decision, it includes some interesting observations about the UCL.
Seeking to recover unpaid wages as restitution under the UCL is now so routine, the Zakaryan opinion says, that this enforcement mechanism is properly described as one of several "[t]raditionally" pursued by aggrieved employees:
Traditionally, the Labor Code provides several mechanisms for three different actors to enforce the above described labor laws.
First, the aggrieved employee may seek judicial or administrative relief. In terms of judicial relief, the employee may “file[] an ordinary civil action against the employer” for (1) breach of contract (Reynolds v. Bement (2005) 36 Cal.4th 1075, 1084 (Reynolds), abrogated on other grounds in Martinez v. Combs (2010) 49 Cal.4th 35), (2) restitution under the Unfair Competition Law (Bus. & Prof. Code, § 17200 et seq.) (Cortez v. Purolator Air Filtration Products Co. (2000) 23 Cal.4th 163, 177-178), or (3) violation of the Labor Code provision at issue if (and only if) the Code authorizes individual employees to bring a claim based on that provision (§§ 1194, subd. (a) [authorizing civil suit to recover “unpaid balance” of overtime premium pay], 218 [authorizing civil suit to recover pay for missed meal and rest periods and waiting time penalty]). ....
Slip op. at 6-7 (emphasis added).
Zakaryan also had this to say about permissible "splitting" of UCL and CLRA claims:
Broughton held that an individual plaintiff’s claim under the Consumer Legal Remedies Act (CLRA) (Civ. Code, § 1750 et seq.) could be split into two and shunted into two different fora—namely, his claim for damages sent to arbitration and his claim for injunctive relief to “enjoin[][the defendant’s allegedly] deceptive [methods, acts and] practices” to remain in court. (Boughton, at pp. 1079-1084.) Following on Broughton’s heels, Cruz held that an individual plaintiff’s claim under the Unfair Competition Law (UCL) (Bus. & Prof. Code, § 17200 et seq.) could likewise be split into two and shunted into two different fora—namely, his claim for restitution to arbitration and his claim for injunctive relief to “‘enjoin[] [the defendant’s allegedly] wrongful acts and practices’” to remain in court. (Cruz, at pp. 308-309, 312-313, 315.) Broughton and Cruz sanctioned the claim splitting because the individual plaintiff’s CLRA and UCL claims, respectively, involved two primary rights—namely, the individual plaintiff’s right to be made whole (through damages or restitution) and the public’s right to be protected from deceptive or wrongful practices (through a “public injunction” sought by the individual plaintiff “act[ing] in the purest sense as a private attorney general”). (Cruz, at p. 312; Broughton, at pp. 1079-1080, 1084; see also McGill v. Citibank, N.A. (2017) 2 Cal.5th 945, 961 [“the public injunctive relief available under the UCL [and] the CLRA . . . is primarily ‘for the benefit of the general public’ . . . [and] ‘not to resolve a private dispute’”].) In other words, individual CLRA and UCL plaintiffs sometimes wear two hats while the employee who brings a solitary PAGA action always wears but one; the former may accordingly be split while the latter may not.
Id. at 13-14 (emphasis added) (citing Cruz v. PacifiCare Health Systems, Inc., 30 Cal.4th 303 (2003); Broughton v. Cigna Healthplans, 21 Cal.4th 1066 (1999)).
Comments