Public agencies in California are not subject to a controversial law that gives workers the power to sue their employers over alleged labor violations, the state’s Supreme Court has ruled.

In the unanimous decision issued last week in a case involving a large healthcare system in the Bay Area, justices on California’s top court also found that public employers are largely exempt from wage law giving workers the right to daily meal and rest breaks.

Taken together, the two prongs of the ruling significantly curtail the ability of public employees in the state to seek help from the courts in labor disputes. Advocates for workers criticized the decision, while others said it would provide needed protections for agencies against costly lawsuits and penalties.

“Public employers are getting hit with lawsuits that can be very expensive to defend,” said Brian P. Walter, an attorney. The decision “is beneficial for the public.”

The case stemmed from a lawsuit filed in 2021 by a medical assistant and nurse working at Highland Hospital in Oakland against Alameda Health System, which operates several hospitals and clinics. The workers alleged their employer frequently denied or discouraged staff from taking breaks to eat and rest, deducted half an hour of pay from each work day even if a worker didn’t take a meal break, and failed to keep accurate payroll records.

The suit sought civil penalties for those violations under the Private Attorneys General Act, which grants workers the ability to sue employers on behalf of themselves and other employees over allegations of wage theft and other workplace abuses.

The case delved squarely into the unsettled intersection of labor law and government agencies. Some provisions of California labor code are ambiguous on whether they apply to the public sector, while others clearly include public employees. For example, a new statute enacted in 2023, explicitly requires meal and rest breaks for public employees involved directly in patient care in hospital, clinic and other public health settings.

The court’s ruling, authored by Justice Carol A. Corrigan, clarified that the labor code only applies to public agencies when they are expressly included. The “plain language of the governing wage order … excludes public employers from most of the wage and hour obligations it places on private employers,” she wrote.

On the issue of the right of public employees to sue their employers, Corrigan said the Legislature did not intend government agencies to incur penalties under the Private Attorneys General Act. It would be strange for a public agency to have to pay out such penalties and attorney fees from taxpayer-funds, as “the result would simply rob Peter to pay Paul,” the ruling said.

PAGA allows workers to pursue civil penalties on the state’s behalf, with a quarter of any award going to the employees who brought the claim and the rest to the state’s Labor and Workforce Development Agency to help fund its enforcement of labor rules.

In light of the ruling, state lawmakers could pass new legislation or amend the law to include government workers, the court said. Lawmakers, however, may be reluctant to revisit the act’s wording following a recent compromise that lessened penalties under the law to address long-running concerns from businesses that it left them exposed to potentially devastating rulings.

Some lower courts have upheld PAGA lawsuits by public employees in the past, but the top court’s decision prevents such rulings in the future.

The decision adds to a long history of “cutting public employees out of certain rights,” said Ari Stiller, attorney for the California Employment Lawyers Assn. Treating public employers as sovereign entities “hurts public workers,” Stiller said.

Stiller said the ruling is at odds with previous statements by justices arguing that PAGA is one of the most important statutes workers have available to them to enforce their labor code rights. Although unions representing public sector workers may be able to negotiate rights for workers similar to those provided by state laws, Stiller said, “that’s not a strong justification for depriving all public workers of those rights in the first place.”

Hiding in plain sight in the first annual report issued by the parent company of Donald Trump’s Truth Social platform was a statement of inescapable, well, truth.

Issued, perhaps appropriately, on April 1 by Trump Media and Technology Group, the report said: “The value of TMTG’s brand may diminish if the popularity of President Trump were to suffer.” This was cited as a “risk factor” in holding the company’s stock.

So here we are. Since July 21, when President Joe Biden ended his campaign for reelection and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to run against Trump, the stock has been spiraling toward oblivion.

From then through Tuesday, shares of the company bearing Trump’s initials (DJT) as its ticker symbol have lost nearly 39% of its value. (The broad stock market as measured by the Standard & Poor’s 500 index has gained almost 2% over the same time span.)

The shares have gained in daily value only five times during that period, and lost ground on 17. The shares closed Tuesday at $21.42, down 82 cents or 3.71%, following a slide of 3.56% the day before.

In the context of the grand sweep of DJT’s history as a publicly traded company, that’s not so remarkable. Measured from its closing price of $57.99 on March 26, when it went public, the stock is down about 63%. Measured from its peak of $79.38, which it reached that day before pulling back, the loss is 73%. Choose which of these calculations you wish; either one fits the dictionary definition of “ugly.”

It’s certainly possible that DJT will have recovered some or all of its daily decline by the end of Tuesday’s trading, and even possible that it will emerge from the longer-term schneid in which it currently seems imprisoned. The stock’s volatility has made GameStop look like a sober, stable financial asset.

That said, however, the headwinds are building — not that they were ever any secret.

The principal headwind, of course, is the one telegraphed in that annual report: Trump himself. Since Biden’s withdrawal upended the presidential race and brought Kamala Harris to the fore, Trump’s prospects for victory in the November election have distinctly faded.

In parallel, Trump’s rhetoric and behavior on the stump have become more unhinged and febrile. His standing among the MAGA faithful may have remained solid, but his appeal to independent voters appears to have shrunk — it certainly hasn’t been enhanced. Since DJT is seen as a proxy for his electoral campaign, its slide in value is unsurprising.

But other counterweights have become more significant. One is the question of what Trump intends to do with his own shares in the company, which came to 59.9% of the total shares as of mid-July, according to its financial disclosures. Trump will be entitled to sell any or all of those shares starting in mid-September, when a six-month lockup period expires.

Any indication that Trump is moving to liquidate his exposure to DJT would almost certainly crater the shares’ price; anticipation that he is plotting to leave his outside investors in the lurch, as he has done to investors, partners and customers in other ventures, may account for some of the shares’ weakness.

Trump owns so much of the company that he might be able to realize $1 billion or more via stock sales before other shareholders have a chance to get out the door without taking a loss.

Trump already has shown that he doesn’t take his responsibility to support Truth Social very seriously. He established the platform as a branded alternative to Twitter (now X) after he was thrown off Twitter following the Jan. 6 insurrection. But there is no contractual requirement binding Trump to use Truth Social as his exclusive social media outlet.

One provision of his licensing agreement with DJT requires that he post his personal social media communications on Truth Social six hours before posting them on other platforms.

But his deal with the company allows him to post “politically-related” messages on any platform he chooses — and he has the sole right to determine which posts fall into that category. The company says it “lacks any meaningful remedy” if it disagrees with his designation of posts as “politically-related.”

Elon Musk restored Trump’s account on X in November; he posted there rarely until recently, when his activity picked up. And Trump has posted some tweets on that platform. More notably, on Aug. 12, he Joined Musk for a two-hour rambling, glitch-marred “interview” on X, not Truth Social.

Then there’s the stature of the company as a going concern. It issues all the disclosures required of a public company in the U.S., but anyone reading them would be well advised to open a window first.

Financially speaking, although it still has a market value of $4 billion, the company doesn’t resemble any enterprise that could have been imagined by the value-investing pioneers Benjamin Graham and David Dodd. In its most recent quarterly disclosure, issued Aug. 12, it reported a loss of $344 million on revenue of $1.4 million for the first six months of this year.

No one who has followed Trump’s career with any modicum of attention could be shocked by those figures — or indeed by the fact that the stock has done as well as it has despite them.

Truth Social has been a joke from the inception — a joke on many of the same people still flying “Trump Won” flags from their front yards or wearing red MAGA hats in mixed company. As I wrote prior to the IPO, it was taken public via a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, a process that was often employed to circumvent government rules for disclosures to investors. SPACs have fallen out of favor because so many of those deals went bust; Truth Social boasted the highest profile of any of them, but its fate may not be any different.

In that first annual report issued on April Fools Day, the company revealed that it scarcely considered itself a real social media business at all. It said it had no plans to “collect, monitor or report” the traditional metrics used by other social media platforms, such as “average revenue per user, ad impressions and pricing, … monthly and daily active users” — in other words, all the statistics that tell a social media company who is using it, if anyone, and what their participation is worth in dollars and cents.

Having that information would only “divert” the company’s management, the report said, though it wasn’t clear about how management would fashion a strategy for the future if it doesn’t know where it is at present, including just how many users it has.

I wrote in 2021, when the SPAC deal to take Truth Social public was first announced, that it was poised to set a high-water mark for investment schemes. In April, a month after the IPO, I wrote that that Trump might end up laughing all the way to the bank, but his investors would be left with nothing but tears.

We’re well on the way to that glorious moment when I can say, “I told you so.” Or maybe we’re there already.

Former top Seagram and Warner Music executive Edgar Bronfman Jr. has entered the fray to acquire Paramount Global, throwing an 11th-hour curveball in an already chaotic auction of the storied Hollywood entertainment company.

Bronfman submitted a bid Monday to take control of the media conglomerate that owns CBS, MTV, Comedy Central and the Paramount film studio by acquiring the Redstone family holding company, National Amusements Inc., said three sources familiar with the matter who were not authorized to comment publicly. Bronfman’s bid is valued at about $4.3 billion.

The offer comes a month after Shari Redstone and Paramount’s other board members approved a bid from tech scion David Ellison’s Skydance Media to buy Paramount in a multipronged transaction valued at $8.4 billion.

Bronfman is leading an investor group that includes longtime media executives Jon Miller, Steven Paul and John Martin.

“We believe there is significant upside in the Paramount business and in the value of Paramount’s shares,” Bronfman wrote said in a letter to Paramount’s lead independent director, Charles Phillips, which was viewed by The Times.

Bronfman’s offer lands just two days before Paramount’s window to accept alternative bids to Skydance’s proposal closes. Paramount’s special board committee, led by Phillips, must now weigh the two offers for the struggling media company.

Skydance’s deal allowed for a 45-day window during which Paramount could consider competing offers.

A Paramount spokesperson declined to comment on the bid, which was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

It’s not clear that Bronfman’s play for Paramount will be successful.

Shari Redstone has long preferred Ellison’s bid over other those of potential suitors, believing the 41-year-old entrepreneur possesses the ambition, experience and financial heft to lift Paramount from its doldrums.

His father, Oracle Corp. co-founder Larry Ellison, also is backing his son’s effort to build a larger media empire by merging Skydance and Paramount.

Under terms of the proposed deal, Skydance and its financial partners RedBird Capital Partners and private equity firm KKR have agreed to provide a $1.5-billion cash infusion to help Paramount pay down debt. Their deal sets aside $4.5 billion to buy shares of Paramount’s Class B shareholders who are eager to exit.

Non-Redstone Class A shareholders would receive $23 a share to exit. Investors could maintain their shares in the new entity.

But some shareholders have bristled over Ellison’s proposal, alleging that it places an inflated value on Skydance, which has co-produced some of Paramount’s biggest blockbuster movies, including “Top Gun: Maverick.” The subsequent all-stock merger of Skydance into Paramount values Ellison’s firm at $4.75 billion.

Bronfman is seeking to capitalize on controversy over that component of the deal.

“Our proposal eliminates the risks, uncertainties and costs of combining Paramount with Skydance,” Bronfman wrote. “We believe Paramount is most valuable as a standalone business.”

Paramount executives have initiated a deep round of cost-cutting, including eliminating about 2,000 job cuts to achieve $500 million in annual savings. The company suffered a credit downgrade earlier this year.

Bronfman’s group believes it could slash another $3 billion in permanent costs by achieving greater profits in the streaming division, employing artificial intelligence in business functions and “right sizing the bloated corporate structure,” according to their letter.

Under both scenarios, the Redstone family would receive $1.75 billion for National Amusements — a company that holds the family’s Paramount shares and a regional movie theater chain founded during the Great Depression — after the firm’s considerable debts are paid off.

Bronfman’s group said they would pay non-Redstone A-Class shareholders $24.53 a share — more than what’s envisioned in the Skydance deal. Non-voting B-Class shareholders could cash out at $16 a share.

Paramount shares traded at $10.86 Tuesday morning, falling about 2%.

The late Sumner Redstone’s National Amusements was once valued at nearly $10 billion, but pandemic-related theater closures, last year’s Hollywood labor strikes and a heavy debt burden sent its fortunes spiraling. In the last five years, the New York-based company has lost two-thirds of its value.

Paramount has agreed to pay a $400-million breakup fee to Skydance if the deal doesn’t close.

Bronfman’s bid would cover that $400-million breakup fee, the Wall Street Journal reported.