A "Headless" PAGA Claims Is Permitted Pre-2024, But Now The Law Has Changed.

                             Headless Statue of Athena, Goddess of Wisdom.  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. Carole Raddato, photographer.

        A “headless” PAGA case is one in which the plaintiff abandons their individual PAGA claims and pursues only representative claims on behalf of other employees and the State. This has been a tactic used to avoid arbitration of personal claims and preserve standing to litigate nonindividual PAGA representative claims in court. Because SCOTUS held in 2022 in Viking River Cruises, Inc. v. Moriana, that individual PAGA claimants could be compelled to arbitrate their individual labor law claim, employees and their attorneys in California used the workaround of dropping individual claims so that representative claims could be litigated in court.  

        The Fifth District holds that headless PAGA actions are permissible under the pre-2024 version of PAGA. CRST Expedited, Inc. v. Superior Court, F088569 (5th Dist.  7/7/25) (Franson, Detjen, De Santos).

        COMMENT:  PAGA law changed for civil actions filed on or after June 19, 2024. If CRST Expedited had been filed on or after June 19, 2024, the post-2024 PAGA framework would not permit headless PAGA cases. Under the new law, because Sanchez (the plaintiff) would have had to have personally suffered each alleged violation to bring a PAGA action for others, dismissing his individual claims would strip him of standing for headless claims. The viability of proceeding without individual claims would vanish.