/>iA California Court of Appeal recently held that an employee bringing a claim under the Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA) must be able to allege that he personally suffered a Labor Code violation within the applicable one-year statute of limitations period.
Williams v. Alacrity Solutions Group, LLC, 2025 WL 1165248, at *1 (Cal. Ct. App., Apr. 22, 2025, No. B335445). This case furthers the recent trend against “headless” representative PAGA claims.
PAGA lawsuits are governed by a one-year statute of limitations. Corbin Williams filed a PAGA lawsuit against his former employer, Alacrity Solutions Group, LLC, more than one year after he had left employment. Recognizing that any individual claim for PAGA penalties he might have would be “time-barred,” Williams purported to file his complaint solely in a representative capacity to obtain PAGA penalties on behalf of others.
Alacrity challenged the complaint, arguing that Williams’s complaint should be dismissed because his individual PAGA claim was barred by the one-year statute of limitations and, without an individual claim, he failed to state a valid PAGA cause of action. The trial court agreed with Alacrity and dismissed the case.
On appeal, the court ruled that a PAGA claim necessarily contains both an individual claim and a representative claim, relying on Leeper v. Shipt, Inc., 107 Cal.App.5th 1001 (2024). Moreover, the court held that the employee bringing the lawsuit must be able to set forth a timely individual claim for PAGA penalties before the employee can seek any penalties on a representative basis. The court rejected Williams’s argument that he could proceed with a so-called “headless” PAGA case where he had no personal “skin in the game.” A PAGA plaintiff, the court reasoned, should not be permitted to file suit “10, 20 or 30 years after leaving the defendant-employer’s employ as long as he alleged that unidentified current employees had been subjected to Labor Code violations in the last year. In such instances, the Labor Code violations would have continued for years without being remediated or deterred, the evidence of those violations would have become stale, and the [Labor & Workforce Development] Agency would be hard pressed to make an informed decision about allocating scarce resources to investigate.”
As support for its conclusion, the court noted that in 2024 the state legislature had amended PAGA to clarify that an employee must always prove a timely, individual violation in order to proceed in a representative capacity. The legislature passed the 2024 amendments because PAGA “had been manipulated over its 20-year history by certain trial attorneys as a money-making scheme.” In Williams, the court found that employees must show they have timely, individual claims under the pre-2024 version of the statute as well.
Williams marks a significant victory for employers, following the recent trend of case law and legislative changes designed to eliminate the ability of employees to bring “headless” PAGA claims.
