Take a 1,100-page labor code, a law that empowers every employee with a gripe, a climate of unending grievance, and your state too can have an economic hell on earth. If your state government can’t hire enough agents and bureaucrats to enforce the mammoth code’s tangle of provisions, deputize the grumblers and their ambulance chasers to seek millions in awards, bankrupting who knows how many businesses. No surprise, that’s what California has done, and has been doing for years. The dubious law is called the Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA), and it is before the U.S. Supreme Court in Viking River Cruises, Inc. v. Moriana. Will the High Court finally extinguish this dumpster fire of a state law? We’ll see.
In another example of the politics of the Big Lie, California’s demagogue-in-chief, Gov. Gavin Newsom, had the audacity to complain of Texas’s use (2021) of California’s well-trodden lawsuit lollapalooza, this time in defense of unborn life, when Newsom said, “We’re going to start playing by their rules now.” The brazenness is amazing, given that California has been at it since at least 2016. “Start”?
At issue before the Court is the claim of Viking Cruises that turning over employee grievance to the plaintiff’s bar is a violation of the grievance provisions in federal law. They’ve got a point. Why turn to the grievance procedure when a pot of gold awaits the grievant at the end of PAGA’s rainbow, thereby short-circuiting federal law?
Two California cases illustrate the immoral cash cow. First, Blaine Eastcott’s Rockreation (rock-climbing gym) was rocked with a lawsuit and a $3.3 million award to a two-month employee just two months into his ownership of the business. Gone are the bonuses, promotions, and wage increases for all the other workers. Second, Uber got slammed with a $7.75 million settlement. Each of the powers-that-be took their pound of flesh: $3.6 million for the state and $2.3 million for the legal eagles. Should employee gripes turn them and their grifting lawyers into millionaires, with more millions for apparatchiks to grease the palms of their supporters? I think not.
The Court should end this practice of turning the plaintiff’s bar into deputized vigilantes. The lesson should be to take your workplace grousing to arbitration as per federal and state law or seek a new job. And that means striking down Texas’s law. Waiting in the wings on the Court’s docket is a decision in the Dobbs case, which should end the High Court’s reading of abortion into the Constitution. States should have returned to them the power to regulate abortion, and make the practice of law less lucrative.
We could cut the membership of the Bar Association in half and be much better for it. But Big Government necessitates a Big Bar to navigate the legal maze and exploit its opportunities for fun and profit. It’s another embarrassment out of the land of sun, gangs, graffiti everywhere, crime, high-priced everything, homeless encampments, urban filth, and blackouts.
RogerG
*Read the article that serves as the basis for this post.