Good morning, welcome to my latest edition of Monday Morning Briefing. I am conducting a Webinar this morning on the topic of Tip Pooling hosted by the folks at KickFin at 11am today, so I need to type in record time, let’s see if I can do this.
So I am going to make this very quick this morning. I’ll give you a very quick recap of the oral argument in Adolph v Uber from last week, which amazingly, I think most of us watching agree on. I told you last week that the question before the California Supreme Court, in reviewing the Viking River Cruises decision from SCOTUS, is what would happen with the non-individual claims when the individual claim got sent to arbitration.
The attorneys both presented compelling arguments, but quite honestly, they weren’t all that far apart. And I think that is why it seems perhaps that the decision was all but made by the Supremes. Plaintiff’s counsel, Michael Rubin, argued vigorously that once the lead Plaintiff established that he was an aggrieved employee with presumably enough at stake to file the Complaint in the first place, the fact that his claims were now being sent to arbitration should not cost him standing as the representative plaintiff regarding the non-individual claims. Rubin argued that this Plaintiff still had enough “skin in the game,” even though his claims were being adjudicated in arbitration.
However, Plaintiff’s counsel made what we thought was a shocking concession during oral argument. When asked by the Justices what would happen to the case if the lead Plaintiff lost in arbitration, Mr. Rubin stated “If the plaintiff loses and is found not to be an aggrieved employee, that’s the end of the case.” My jaw literally dropped.
With that concession, and assuming the Supreme Court agrees, the non-individual claims CAN NOT go on if the lead plaintiff’s case fails, which means that those group claims would have to be stayed pending the outcome of the arbitration of the lead plaintiff’s case. That is NOT what the appellate cases have been holding up to this point. This is the compromise ruling we were somewhat hoping we would get, since we knew getting the “dream” holding was pretty much impossible.
So there may be a little light at the end of the Viking River Cruises tunnel after all. We will have to await to see the official ruling. And if so, it will give us a wee bit of bargaining room in these cases.
And the war wages on.
POWER PLAYS IN THE WORKPLACE: DON’T LET YOUR IP AND PASSWORDS BE HELD HOSTAGE
I know this is going to hit a nerve with a LOT of you. I was speaking with one of my clients last week, who was lamenting that she was having a ridiculously hard time extracting the key passwords from one of their key employees. In this particular situation, the employee in question was in the middle of a performance improvement plan, but had also suddenly been having absenteeism problems, and now it was discovered that she knew and was failing to disclose certain key passwords to particular employee emails. I made a comment about how it always seems to happen that certain employees put themselves into these situations, and I said “watch, the next client I speak to will have a similar story .. . .” Sure enough, the very next call I took, I asked the question, and I was regaled with a story about a key employee who held their Wi-Fi password hostage. Just, because.
Too often, these situations present in far more dire circumstances, when employees leave and we truly are locked out of accounts or no longer have the code to access key programs. Or when it turns out plaintiffs in lawsuits have copies of crucial confidential emails because they have had access to all the internal emails. You really cannot allow these situations to happen. Make sure your IT is on top of who has what passwords, and change them regularly enough to keep them confidential. Ensure redundancies with ALL key alarm, program, Wi-Fi codes and passwords at inception. NO ONE PERSON should ever be the keeper of all that information. There must always be back-up plans and contingencies, indeed, you may want contingencies kept off site or in the hands of trusted people outside the company. Just have plans.
Okay, I finished with time to go freshen up my make-up before we go live.
Oh, and by the way, Jason Berkowitz did a bang up job on that podcast. It was a hoot to hear myself on a freaking podcast, but forget me, the whole things was a quick five minutes or so just packed with valuable information about the local hospitality market. So if you haven’t checked it out already (like my daughter did immediately), here it is again. It’s a super quick, fun listen. I found it on Spotify, but it’s on all the podcasts:
LA Hospitality News To Go, or check out this website: https://www.lahospitalitynewstogo.com/
Hope you all had a great Mother’s Day weekend – it is finally starting to really feel like Spring in LA. Get out and enjoy those last few weeks of wildflowers. Hope to “see” a few of you on the Webinar shortly. Have a great week.
#StandWithUkraine