A California Court of Appeal has handed employers two welcome rulings under the Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA). In Taduran v. Glidewell, the court confirmed that trial courts have broad discretion to reduce a maximum PAGA penalty using any reasonable method, and equally broad discretion to apply a negative multiplier that lowers a prevailing plaintiff’s attorneys’ fee award. For employers facing large PAGA exposure, the decision is an important signal of how much room trial courts have to bring eye-popping penalty demands and fee requests down to size. You can read the full decision here.
Plaintiff Abraham Taduran sued his former employer, dental-products maker Glidewell, under PAGA, alleging a series of California Labor Code violations. By the time of trial, the parties had stipulated to liability and undisputed facts on four issues — defective wage statements, rest-period pay calculated on rounded fractional hours, underpaid overtime because non-productive time pay was left out of the regular-rate calculation, and underpaid overtime because of bonus pay was left out of the regular-rate calculation. The single question for the court was the amount of civil penalties.
The numbers show why the case matters. Taduran argued the maximum aggregate PAGA penalty came to roughly $56 million. The trial court awarded $515,965 — a fraction of one percent of that figure. On fees, Taduran sought just over $1.57 million (a $1.047 million...
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