With wage and hour violations, each employee’s damages are often relatively low, too low for an attorney to get involved. Sometimes, wage theft is so low that it almost isn’t worth pursuing on an individual basis. While that may be true for each individual employee, when all those little amounts are combined, they add up to big savings for the employer (and its shareholders). When there are widespread violations throughout the company, sometimes it is more efficient to challenge them through some sort of representative action, either through a class action or through a representative PAGA (the Labor Code Private Attorneys General Act of 2004) action.
Being a class or PAGA action representative takes a special kind of person. You have to want to help make things better, not just for yourself but for others who used to work at the company, who still work at the company, and – if you can get the company to change its workplace policies or procedures – who will work for the company in the future. You must place the interests of others above your own personal interests. You must be willing to be the public face of a representative action, meaning people (both inside and outside the company) will associate your name with the lawsuit.
A class action can be the most effective way to simultaneously vindicate the rights of many (in some cases hundreds, if not thousands) employees without the cost or the risk of inconsistent results stemming from that many individual lawsuits. In a class action, the focus is on the specific harms the employees suffered (for example, unpaid overtime or meal or rest period premiums) and what that value is to them.
A PAGA representative action, by contrast, is an enforcement action in which an individual plaintiff stands in the shoes of a state agency (the Labor and Workforce Development Agency, or LWDA) and tries to collect penalties on behalf of the agency for each Labor Code violation the employer committed as if they were the agency. In passing PAGA, the California Legislature acknowledged that the LWDA did not have the resources on its own to investigate all workplace violations in a state with millions of workers. Thus, the law deputizes private citizens (calling them “private attorneys general”) and incentivizes them to do the work the LWDA cannot.
Imagine standing at the company’s front door with a clipboard and a checklist and checking off each box on the checklist, where the “boxes” represent the number of times the company violated the Labor Code per employee for each pay period. Just like the LWDA would impose penalties for each violation, so, too, does a PAGA representative plaintiff seek to collect penalties for each violation. Keep in mind, though, that the penalties belong to the State of California; as such, seventy-five percent of all penalties that PAGA representatives succesfully collect go to the state, and the remaining twenty-five percent of the penalties are divided equally among all the aggrieved employees. A UCLA Labor Center 2020 report found that PAGA lawsuits helped strengthen California’s enforcement resources, change corporate culture regarding compliance, prevent millions of dollars annually in wage theft, and provide collective access to remedies on behalf of millions of employees. This is vital work on behalf of all workers.
Our attorneys have extensive experience with class and PAGA actions, so please consult with one of our attorneys to see if you have a claim that may fit those parameters.
