Protect yourself

Current and former employees can inspect and get a copy of their personnel records about performance or complaints. Send a written request. The employer has 30 days to comply and may owe a $750 penalty if it does not.

• Pay records: current and former employees can inspect or copy their payroll records. The employer must comply within 21 days.
• Signed documents: if you signed anything related to getting or keeping your job, such as an offer letter, policy acknowledgment, or arbitration agreement, you are entitled to a copy on request.

• Save your own pay stubs, reviews, schedules, and messages sent to you.
• Don't take confidential company files, customer data, trade secrets, or other employees' private information. That can hurt your case.
• Never delete texts, emails, or posts about what happened, even bad ones. Deleting evidence can sink a case.

California law generally makes it illegal to record a confidential conversation without the consent of everyone in it. A conversation is confidential if the circumstances suggest someone wants it kept between the people talking. A meeting in your manager's office usually would be.

• Secret recording can lead to fines.
• A recording made that way generally cannot be used as evidence in court or in a government proceeding.

Many California employers have new hires sign an arbitration agreement, often buried in onboarding paperwork or an app. It means a workplace dispute goes to a private arbitrator instead of a judge and jury.

• Employers can generally require one as a condition of the job. A 2019 California law that tried to ban this was blocked in court because federal law overrides it.
• The employer has to prove you agreed. But staying on the job after clear written notice that arbitration is a condition of keeping it can count as agreeing.
• Arbitration does not erase your rights. It changes where and how you enforce them.

For discrimination, harassment, retaliation, and other rights you cannot give up, a California court will enforce an arbitration agreement only if it:

• uses a neutral arbitrator;
• allows enough discovery (documents and witness testimony) to prove your case;
• requires a written decision;
• lets you win everything you could win in court; and
• does not make you pay the arbitrator's fees or any cost you would not pay in court.

If the agreement was forced on you with no real choice and its terms are one-sided, a court can refuse to enforce it. Red flags:

• only your kinds of claims go to arbitration, while the employer keeps the right to sue you in court;
• a shorter deadline to bring claims than the law allows;
• limits on what you can recover;
• making you pay the employer's lawyers if you lose;
• tight limits on gathering evidence, with no way to ask for more;
• rules that were never given to you or are hard to find.

Courts look at the agreement as a whole. A single bad term is often cut out, while several can sink the entire agreement.

A 2022 federal law lets you refuse arbitration in a case involving sexual harassment or sexual assault, even if you signed an arbitration agreement. It applies to disputes that arose or accrued on or after March 3, 2022.

• It is your choice. You can still pick arbitration if you want it.
• California appeals courts have held it can keep the whole case in court, including related claims like retaliation.
• A judge, not the arbitrator, decides whether the law applies.

In employment arbitration the employer generally pays the arbitration fees. Under California law, if the employer is more than 30 days late paying, you can usually choose to leave arbitration and take your case to court, and the court must order the employer to pay the costs and attorney fees the late payment caused you.

In 2025 the California Supreme Court held that an employer acting in good faith can sometimes be excused for paying late, if it fixes the problem promptly and makes up for any harm. Deliberate nonpayment is not excused.

Many arbitration agreements make you give up class actions, and those waivers are usually enforced.

But you cannot completely give up a PAGA case, a lawsuit you bring on behalf of the State for Labor Code violations. Your own part may be sent to arbitration, while the part covering other employees can wait in court.

Quitting can make a case harder. To treat a resignation as a firing, the law requires intolerable conditions that the employer created or knew about. Before you resign:

• report the problem in writing to someone in authority,
• give the company a chance to fix it, and
• talk to a lawyer.