HR can no longer safely ignore complaints based on 'wrong' legal assumptions in California
A California court just made it riskier to fire workers who complain about legal violations, even when they get the law wrong.
The December 15, 2025 ruling from California's Fourth District Court of Appeal sends a clear message to human resources departments: you cannot dismiss an employee's concerns simply because they misunderstood the statute they were citing. What matters is whether their belief was reasonable, not whether it was legally correct.
The case involved Manuel Contreras, who worked at Green Thumb Produce for four years driving forklifts in the sanitation department. When he discovered he was making less than coworkers doing similar work, some with less time at the company, he repeatedly asked his supervisors about it. They did nothing.
In August 2020, Contreras decided to investigate. He called the Labor Commissioner's Office in San Bernardino County, where a deputy told him the company might be breaking the law. The deputy pointed him to California's Equal Pay Act and suggested he check the Labor Commissioner's website for more information.
Contreras printed out a seven-page FAQ document about the Equal Pay Act and read through it. With his tenth-grade education and no legal training, he concluded that Green Thumb was violating the law by paying him less than others for substantially similar work.
On September 3, 2020, he brought the printout to work. During his lunch...
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