Business
The battle brewing over California workers' unique right to sue their bosses
California workers who believe they have been victims of wage theft or other workplace abuses have for more than two decades relied on a unique state law that lets them sue employers not only for themselves but also for other workers.
Now a battle is shaping up over the law, known as the Private Attorneys General Act, or PAGA. An initiative seeking to replace PAGA will appear on the ballot in California in November, the culmination of long-standing efforts by corporate and industry groups to undo the law.
Two reports released last week offer dueling narratives about whether PAGA helps or hurts workers — marking the opening of a potentially expensive fight over the landmark law that relatively few know about.
Labor researchers say that the ballot measure, if approved, would harm employees, particularly people with low-wage jobs, by taking away their ability to file what are essentially class-action suits against employers that allege labor law violations. The ballot measure also would weaken the state’s already strained system for enforcing workplace laws, the researchers say.
But the business coalition backing the ballot initiative, called the Fair Play and Employer Accountability Act, counters that the labor law has resulted in a proliferation of lawsuits that small businesses and nonprofits have little ability to fight. Workers end up getting less money after a long legal process than if they had filed complaints through state agencies, the initiative’s proponents say.
Worker advocates have long complained that chronic understaffing at state agencies responsible for investigating employee complaints means that allegations about wage theft and other violations can take years to be resolved. So workers turn to the courts.
Luz Perez Bautista and her mother, Maria de la Luz Bautista-Perez, were among three named plaintiffs who sued Juul Labs Inc. in federal court in 2020 for allegedly misclassifying some 450 campaign staffers working on a ballot measure the company was promoting to allow the sale of electronic cigarettes in San Francisco. The workers were all classified as independent contractors rather than employees, which saddled them with expenses that employees wouldn’t have to pay.
Juul was sued in 2020 by three workers, who alleged they were misclassified as independent contractors rather than employees, using a California law that allows employees to sue companies on behalf of other workers.
(Ted Shaffrey / Associated Press)
Workers were made to travel long distances between campaign offices without pay, were not given lunch breaks and were terminated abruptly, Perez Bautista said, speaking at a news conference last week to unveil a report by the UCLA Labor Center as well as researchers at advocacy groups PowerSwitch Action, and the Center for Popular Democracy.
Because the workers had signed arbitration agreements, without PAGA they would not have had the legal standing to take Juul and the nonprofit it created for the campaign to court. Through their PAGA claim workers secured a $1.75-million settlement.
“It is important for other workers to see that … you can hold your boss accountable,” Bautista-Perez said at the news conference.
The report argues broadly that eliminating workers’ ability to pursue private lawsuits would leave them more vulnerable to having their wages stolen by employers and other abuses of their rights.
PAGA plays a “vital role” in bringing bad actors into compliance, said Tia Koonse, legal and policy research manager at the UCLA Labor Center.
Koonse and other authors of the report said the ballot initiative is disingenuously framed as a push to reform PAGA and bolster other enforcement mechanisms.
“By cloaking policies that hurt workers in language that says they’re helping workers, corporations are making it sound like what is down is up,” said Minsu Longiaru, senior staff attorney for PowerSwitch Action.
Other mechanisms to enforce California labor laws are insufficient on their own, including wage claims and whistleblower complaints investigated by state agencies, the report argues, because the sheer number of labor violations dwarfs the state’s capacity to enforce them.
Each year, the $40 million recovered in approximately 30,000 wage claims filed with the state labor commissioner represents roughly 2% of the estimated $2 billion California workers lose to wage theft, according to the report.
An analysis of California Labor & Workforce Development Agency data by the report’s authors found that 91% of PAGA claims allege wage theft, primarily overtime violations and failure to pay for all hours worked, although some involved violations of earned sick leave rights. Other forms of wage theft include paying workers less than minimum wage, denying workers meal breaks or rest periods and requiring employees to finish tasks before or after their shifts.
The initiative at the center of discussion, the Fair Play and Employer Accountability Act, got the green light to be placed on the November 2024 ballot almost two years ago.
It proposes to remove the law’s powerful private right of action, which empowers workers to file lawsuits against their employers, suing for both back wages and civil penalties on behalf of themselves, other employees and the state of California. Official language for the measure states it would eliminate “employees’ ability to file lawsuits for monetary penalties for state labor law violations.”
Backers emphasize it also offers replacement provisions that would bolster state agency enforcement of workplace rules.
Replacement provisions include doubling penalties for employers “willfully” violating labor law, requiring 100% of monetary penalties to be awarded to harmed employees (rather than the current division of 25% to the employee and 75% to the state of California), and requiring that the state provide employers with resources to help with coming into compliance.
“Today’s PAGA system is completely broken and does not work well for employees or employers,” said Jennifer Barrera, president of the California Chamber of Commerce, in announcing a report released last week by backers of the ballot initiative, called the Fix PAGA coalition.
Barrera said that because one employee can sue on behalf of others, it allows lawyers to stack charges and extract high penalties from employers with few barriers because PAGA claims don’t require the same type of notification and certification of workers allegedly affected that a class-action suit would require.
“The statutory framework of PAGA is what creates the abuse,” she said in an interview.
Barry Jardini, executive director of the California Disability Services Assn., said that members of the trade group, many of which are nonprofits reliant on state or federal funding, are increasingly burdened by PAGA claims. He said 20 of some 85 members who responded to a recent survey said they dealt with PAGA claims in 2023.
Jardini said that disability service businesses have struggled to provide true “responsibility-free” 10-minute rest breaks in accordance with labor laws because often workers “can’t just walk away” from clients especially if they are out and about instead of at home. He said employers have looked for creative solutions, such as paying employees extra for working through breaks or tacking on breaks at the beginnings or ends of shifts rather than the middle, but these fixes aren’t legal substitutes for rest breaks workers are entitled to.
“We run into a bit of a legal rock and a hard place,” he said. “We do have a conflict with the law in terms of some of our services. Once that becomes known, it’s relatively easy for an attorney to try to solicit a client that works in this industry that is maybe ripe for PAGA claims.”
The claims sap resources and lead to program closures because “providers with very thin margins are using up their reserves on settling these claims,” Jardini said. “Other times providers are unable to give wage increases to their staff. And at the end of the day it impacts people with disabilities.”
Some disagree that there is rampant of abuse of PAGA. UCLA Labor Center researchers published a report in February 2020 finding no evidence that PAGA unleashed a flood of frivolous litigation, as its detractors complain, and that it had demonstrably enhanced Labor Code compliance among employers.
In response to criticisms outlined by the recent UCLA Labor Center report, Kathy Fairbanks, a spokesperson for the coalition, pointed to findings in the coalition’s report, which argues that PAGA is too slow to resolve claims, leaves workers with little compensation, and enriches lawyers while saddling businesses with costly suits.
Fairbanks said that workers get about one-third of the compensation and that PAGA cases take twice as long compared with cases adjudicated by state agencies. That is because “lawyers take massive fees and are getting rich while workers get very little,” Fairbanks said.
Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher, head of the powerful California Labor Federation, agreed that PAGA is at times abused by “unscrupulous attorneys,” but said repealing the law is not a solution.
“There’s massive wage theft that goes unaccounted for, and to take away this tool from the tool box would be damaging to workers and a gift for corporate America,” said Gonzalez, who formerly served as a state assembly member known for writing labor-friendly legislation.
If approved by voters, the ballot measure “would leave workers with dwindling opportunities to enforce labor law.”
Gonzalez said it is well understood that state labor agencies are subject to short staffing and ebbs and flows of political desire to take on major cases. Although it’s not ideal to have to rely on private attorneys to help enforce the law, PAGA provides an important avenue for enforcement, she said.
The initiative doesn’t mandate or otherwise clear the way for increased funding for enforcement agencies, Gonzalez said.
To suggest the business lobby, through the ballot initiative, is asking for changes that will actually improve labor law enforcement “doesn’t pass the smell test,” she said.
Backers of the ballot initiative are open to working on a legislative compromise to avert a costly battle, spokesperson Fairbanks said. But any sort of deal would have to be reached before the end of June — the deadline to pull measures off the November ballot. The Fix PAGA coalition reports having banked some $15 million in campaign contributions so far.
Business groups have sought to shrink PAGA’s reach in state and federal courts with limited success in recent years.
In June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court, considering the California case Viking River Cruises Inc. vs. Moriana, ruled that PAGA violated the rights of employers and that the claims of other employees would have to be dismissed because the employee sent to arbitration would no longer have standing to pursue that litigation.
But in a concurring opinion, it also affirmed that interpretation of PAGA was a matter of state, not federal, law and in effect kicked the matter back to California.
State appellate courts consistently have held that PAGA claims by workers cannot be forced into arbitration because they are brought as if the individual is operating on the state’s behalf.
In July 2023, the California Supreme Court rejected an argument by Uber that sought to limit the ability of its drivers to take employment-related disputes to court, unanimously determining that a driver could not sign away the right to represent their peers in a lawsuit.
The decision didn’t end the debate, however, with other cases bouncing around the courts.
A federal appeals court, citing the Uber case, ruled Feb. 12 that a PAGA suit against Lowe’s Home Centers for allegedly underpaying workers who took sick leave could stand.
Judge William Fletcher wrote in the ruling that a state court “has the authority to correct a misinterpretation of that state’s law by a federal court,” including the U.S. Supreme Court.
Welcome to the age of AI hacking, in which the right prompts make amateurs into master hackers.
A group of cybercriminals recently used off-the-shelf artificial intelligence chatbots to steal data on nearly 200 million taxpayers. The bots provided the code and ready-to-execute plans to bypass firewalls.
Although they were explicitly programmed to refuse to help hackers, the bots were duped into abetting the cybercrime.
According to a recent report from Israeli cybersecurity firm Gambit Security, hackers last month used Claude, the chatbot from Anthropic, to steal 150 gigabytes of data from Mexican government agencies.
Claude initially refused to cooperate with the hacking attempts and even denied requests to cover the hackers’ digital tracks, the experts who discovered the breach said. The group pummelled the bot with more than 1,000 prompts to bypass the safeguards and convince Claude they were allowed to test the system for vulnerabilities.
AI companies have been trying to create unbreakable chains on their AI models to restrain them from helping do things such as generating child sexual content or aiding in sourcing and creating weapons. They hire entire teams to try to break their own chatbots before someone else does.
But in this case, hackers continuously prompted Claude in creative ways and were able to “jailbreak” the chatbot to assist them. When they encountered problems with Claude, the hackers used OpenAI’s ChatGPT for data analysis and to learn which credentials were required to move through the system undetected.
The group used AI to find and exploit vulnerabilities, bypass defences, create backdoors and analyze data along the way to gain control of the systems before they stole 195 million identities from nine Mexican government systems, including tax records, vehicle registration as well as birth and property details.
AI “doesn’t sleep,” Curtis Simpson, chief executive of Gambit Security, said in a blog post. “It collapses the cost of sophistication to near zero.”
“No amount of prevention investment would have made this attack impossible,” he said.
Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment. It told Bloomberg that it had banned the accounts involved and disrupted their activity after an investigation.
OpenAI said it is aware of the attack campaign carried out using Anthropic’s models against the Mexican government agencies.
“We also identified other attempts by the adversary to use our models for activities that violate our usage policies; our models refused to comply with these attempts,” an OpenAI spokesperson said in a statement. “We have banned the accounts used by this adversary and value the outreach from Gambit Security.”
Instances of generative AI-assisted hacking are on the rise, and the threat of cyberattacks from bots acting on their own is no longer science fiction. With AI doing their bidding, novices can cause damage in moments, while experienced hackers can launch many more sophisticated attacks with much less effort.
Earlier this year, Amazon discovered that a low-skilled hacker used commercially available AI to breach 600 firewalls. Another took control of thousands of DJI robot vacuums with help from Claude, and was able to access live video feed, audio and floor plans of strangers.
“The kinds of things we’re seeing today are only the early signs of the kinds of things that AIs will be able to do in a few years,” said Nikola Jurkovic, an expert working on reducing risks from advanced AI. “So we need to urgently prepare.”
Late last year, Anthropic warned that society has reached an “inflection point” in AI use in cybersecurity after disrupting what the company said was a Chinese state-sponsored espionage campaign that used Claude to infiltrate 30 global targets, including financial institutions and government agencies.
Generative AI also has been used to extort companies, create realistic online profiles by North Korean operatives to secure jobs in U.S. Fortune 500 companies, run romance scams and operate a network of Russian propaganda accounts.
Over the last few years, AI models have gone from being able to manage tasks lasting only a few seconds to today’s AI agents working autonomously for many hours. AI’s capability to complete long tasks is doubling every seven months.
“We just don’t actually know what is the upper limit of AI’s capability, because no one’s made benchmarks that are difficult enough so the AI can’t do them,” said Jurkovic, who works at METR, a nonprofit that measures AI system capabilities to cause catastrophic harm to society.
So far, the most common use of AI for hacking has been social engineering. Large language models are used to write convincing emails to dupe people out of their money, causing an eight-fold increase in complaints from older Americans as they lost $4.9 billion in online fraud in 2025.
“The messages used to elicit a click from the target can now be generated on a per-user basis more efficiently and with fewer tell-tale signs of phishing,” such as grammatical and spelling errors, said Cliff Neuman, an associate professor of computer science at USC.
AI companies have been responding using AI to detect attacks, audit code and patch vulnerabilities.
“Ultimately, the big imbalance stems from the need of the good-actors to be secure all the time, and of the bad-actors to be right only once,” Neuman said.
The stakes around AI are rising as it infiltrates every aspect of the economy. Many are concerned that there is insufficient understanding of how to ensure it cannot be misused by bad actors or nudged to go rogue.
Even those at the top of the industry have warned users about the potential misuse of AI.
Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, has long advocated that the AI systems being built are unpredictable and difficult to control. These AIs have shown behaviors as varied as deception and blackmail, to scheming and cheating by hacking software.
Still, major AI companies — OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Google — signed contracts with the U.S. government to use their AIs in military operations.
This last week, the Pentagon directed federal agencies to phase out Claude after the company refused to back down on its demand that it wouldn’t allow its AI to be used for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.
“The AI systems of today are nowhere near reliable enough to make fully autonomous weapons,” Amodei told CBS News.
The iPic dine-in movie theater chain has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and intends to pursue a sale of its assets, citing the difficult post-pandemic theatrical market.
The Boca Raton, Fla.-based company has 13 locations across the U.S., including in Pasadena and Westwood, according to a Feb. 25 filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of Florida, West Palm Beach division.
As part of the bankruptcy process, the Pasadena and Westwood theaters will be permanently closed, according to WARN Act notices filed with the state of California’s Employment Development Department.
The company came to its conclusion after “exploring a range of possible alternatives,” iPic Chief Executive Patrick Quinn said in a statement.
“We are committed to continuing our business operations with minimal impact throughout the process and will endeavor to serve our customers with the high standard of care they have come to expect from us,” he said.
The company will keep its current management to maintain day-to-day operations while it goes through the bankruptcy process, iPic said in the statement. The last day of employment for workers in its Pasadena and Westwood locations is April 28, according to a state WARN Act notice. The chain has 1,300 full- and part-time employees, with 193 workers in California.
The theatrical business, including the exhibition industry, still has not recovered from the pandemic’s effect on consumer behavior. Last year, overall box office revenue in the U.S. and Canada totaled about $8.8 billion, up just 1.6% compared with 2024. Even more troubling is that industry revenue in 2025 was down 22.1% compared with pre-pandemic 2019’s totals.
IPic noted those trends in its bankruptcy filing, describing the changes in consumer behavior as “lasting” and blaming the rise of streaming for “fundamentally” altering the movie theater business.
“These industry shifts have directly reduced box office revenues and related ancillary revenues, including food and beverage sales,” the company stated in its bankruptcy filing.
IPic also attributed its decision to rising rents and labor costs.
The company estimated it owed about $141,000 in taxes and about $2.7 million in total unsecured claims. The company’s assets were valued at about $155.3 million, the majority of which coming from theater equipment and furniture. Its liabilities totaled $113.9 million.
The chain had previously filed for bankruptcy protection in 2019.
In an expansion of its business of processing pharmaceuticals in Earth’s orbit, Varda Space Industries is renting a large El Segundo plant where toy manufacturer Mattel used to design Hot Wheels and Barbie dolls.
The plant in El Segundo’s aerospace corridor will be an extension of Varda Space Industries’ headquarters in a much smaller building on nearby Aviation Boulevard.
Varda will occupy a 205,443-square-foot industrial and office campus at 2031 E. Mariposa Ave., which will give it additional capacity to manufacture spacecraft at scale, the company said.
Originally built in the 1940s as an aircraft facility, the complex has a history as part of aerospace and defense industries that have long shaped the South Bay and is near a host of major defense and space contractors. It is also close to Los Angeles Air Force Base, headquarters to the Space Systems Command.
Workers test AstroForge’s Odin asteroid probe, which was lost in space after launch this year.
(Varda Space Industries)
Varda is one of a new generation of aerospace startups that have flourished in Southern California and the South Bay over the last several years, particularly in El Segundo, often with ties to SpaceX.
Elon Musk’s company, founded in 2002 in El Segundo, has revolutionized the industry with reusable rockets that have radically lowered the cost of lifting payloads into space. Though it has moved its headquarters to Texas, SpaceX retains large-scale operations in Hawthorne.
Varda co-founder and Chief Executive Will Bruey is a former SpaceX avionics engineer, and the company’s spacecraft are launched on SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rockets from Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County.
Varda makes automated labs that look like cylindrical desktop speakers, which it sends into orbit in capsules and satellite platforms it also builds. There, in microgravity, the miniature labs grow molecular crystals that are purer than those produced in Earth’s gravity for use in pharmaceuticals.
It has contracts with drug companies and also the military, which tests technology at hypersonic speeds as the capsules return to Earth.
Its fifth capsule was launched in November and returned to Earth in late January; its next mission is set in the coming weeks. Varda has more than 10 missions scheduled on Falcon 9s through 2028.
For the last several decades, the Mariposa Avenue property served as the research and development center for Mattel Toys. El Segundo has also long been a center for the toy industry as companies like to set up shop in the shadow of Mattel.
The Mattel facility “has always been an exceptional property with a legacy tied to aerospace innovation, and leasing to Varda Space Industries feels like a natural continuation of that story,” said Michael Woods, a partner at GPI Cos., which owns the property.
“We are proud to support a company that is genuinely pushing the boundaries of what’s possible, and are excited to watch Varda grow and thrive here in El Segundo,” Woods said.
As one of the country’s most active hubs of aerospace and defense innovation, El Segundo has seen its industrial property vacancy fall to 3.4% on demand from space companies, government contractors and technology startups, real estate brokerage CBRE said.
Successful startups often have to leave the neighborhood when they want to expand, real estate broker Bob Haley of CBRE said. The 9-acre Mattel facility was big enough to keep Varda in the city.
Last year, Varda subleased about 55,000 square feet of lab space from alternative protein company Beyond Meat at 888 Douglas St. in El Segundo, which it started moving into in June.
Varda will get the keys to its new building in December and spend four to eight months building production and assembly facilities as it ramps up operations. By the end of next year, it expects to have constructed 10 more spacecraft.
In the future, Varda could consolidate offices there, given its size. Currently, though, the plan is to retain all properties, creating a campus of three buildings within a mile of one another that are served by the company’s transportation services, Chief Operating Officer Jonathan Barr said.
“We already have Varda-branded shuttles running up and down Aviation Boulevard,” he said.
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