Eleni Gavriiloglou brought this action against her former employer, Prime Healthcare Management, Inc. (Prime Health) and its alleged alter egos, asserting, among other things, (1) individual claims based on Labor Code violations and (2) individual and representative claims for civil penalties for Labor Code violations under the Labor Code Private Attorneys General Act of 2004 (PAGA; Lab. Code, § 2698 et seq.). Pursuant to an arbitration agreement, all non-PAGA Labor Code claims were arbitrated, and the PAGA claim (both the individual and representative claims) were stayed. The arbitrator found in favor of Prime Health on all the alleged Labor Code violations and the trial court confirmed the award and granted judgment on the pleadings against Gavriiloglou on her PAGA claim, ruling that the arbitrator’s findings established that she was not an “aggrieved employee” within the meaning of PAGA and therefore she lacked standing to bring a PAGA claim.
Gavriiloglou appealed, and in that proceeding, we affirmed the denial of her petition to vacate the arbitration award but reversed the ruling that the arbitration award barred her PAGA claim. (Gavriiloglou v. Prime Healthcare Management, Inc. (2022) 83 Cal.App.5th 595, 599, 607 review denied Jan. 11, 2023, S277080 (Gavriiloglou).) Subsequently, Prime Health filed a renewed motion for judgment on the pleadings arguing that since the date of our opinion, two other courts of appeal have disagreed with our holding (see Rocha v. U-Haul Co. of California (2023) 88 Cal.App.5th 65, 79–82 (Rocha), and Rodriguez v. Lawrence Equipment, Inc. (2024) 106 Cal.App.5th 645, 657–658 (Rodriguez)), and that the Supreme Court had established that Gavriiloglou was wrongly decided in Adolph v. Uber Technologies, Inc. (2023) 14 Cal.5th 1104, 1124 (Adolph), although the Adolph decision, which was filed well after Gavriiloglou, did not mention it.
The trial court denied the renewed motion for judgment on the pleadings on the ground that our prior opinion in Gavriiloglou, supra, 83 Cal.App.5th 595 was law of the case, and Prime Health filed this petition for extraordinary relief. In its petition, Prime Health argues the law of the case doctrine was erroneously applied because Adolph, supra, 14 Cal.5th 1104 constitutes intervening controlling law and that the trial court erred in failing to follow the “controlling” decisions of courts having superior jurisdiction. We deny the petition.
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