San Francisco Employment Law Firm Blog

For years, I believed that since the whole purpose of establishing and running non-profit companies in California is providing some kind of service for the public good and not for profit. As a result, I assume that working in non-profit organizations must be a fulfilling experience on more levels and that the relationships between employees and the way the employees are treated by their management is also superior to the for-profit sector.

However, a number of claims I worked on reflect a different reality. Workplace Retaliation in non-profit agencies is quite common. One of the more common forms of retaliation is against a mid-level managers. A manager might suspect or even witness how funds provided to the employer by the government agencies or through other fund raising efforts are mishandled or even embezzled. That manager makes an internal complaint to his boss. That superior manager might be involved directly or indirectly in the unlawful and unethical handling of the funds and thus he tries to push the issue under the rug or starts building a paper trail of unsubstantial allegations of performance issues or insubordination to "lawfully" terminate the whistleblower.

Such retaliation claims are not easy prove that the year certainly worth investigation, as with proper documentation and witnesses to both - the unlawful activity and the retaliation, such claims can result in both substantial settlement or trial verdicts and changes in the company that assure fair proper management of funds.

Most employers are well aware that if they terminate an employee for any reason of if it's a lay-off, they must pay that employee's wages (which includes vacation and sick time if applicable) in full immediately upon discharge. But, what if an employee works for a certain company on per assignment basis, where upon completion of one assignment of a certain duration, the employee might have to wait a shorter or a longer period of time till he receives the next assignment, where having such future work is not even guaranteed.

Recently, my client's employer tried to argue that because my client was expected to receive a new work project within a few months, they did not have to pay him his outstanding, accrued vacation time which accumulated to nearly 500 hours. The employee was out of work for several months, and there was no real assurance that the employer was going to put him on a new project.

At the labor board hearing in San Francisco, the commissioner was persuaded by my argument that under the California Supreme Court ruling in Smith v. Superior Court 39 C4th 77 (2006), "discharge" includes not only termination from ongoing employment relationship, but also release of an employee upon completion of a specified job assignment or time duration for which the employee was hired. In Smith the court determined that a fashion model, who was hired for one-day assignment, had to be paid at the end of that day.

There are a few exceptions to the above rule, the most notable of which is the fact that employees of temporary agencies who are placed to work as temps at a company, do not have to be paid immediately upon completion of assignment, because the very nature of working for a temp agency entails an agreement with such an agency to be paid as per the agency's payroll periods.