The Court of Appeal affirmed, holding as follows:
Plaintiff's complaint alleged only that he and perhaps others at the Costa Mesa store suffered Labor Code violations. Plaintiff showed no knowledge of Marshalls' [sic] practices at other stores. "That being the case, it was eminently reasonable for the trial judge to proceed with discovery in an incremental fashion..."The cost of state-wide discovery also justified incremental discovery.
Nothing in PAGA gives a representative plaintiff the same right to discovery that the Labor Commissioner would have in an enforcement action.
The employees' Constitutional privacy interests outweighed plaintiff’s need to discover their identities at this time.
[Plaintiff's] first task will be to establish he was himself subjected to violations of the Labor Code. As he has not yet sat for deposition, this task remains unfulfilled. The trial court could reasonably conclude that the second task will be to establish Marshalls’ [sic] employment practices are uniform throughout the company, which might be accomplished by reference to a policy manual or perhaps deposition of a corporate officer. The trial court could reasonably conclude that only then will plaintiff be able to set forth facts justifying statewide discovery.The opinion is available here.
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