Viking River Cruises, Inc. v. Moriana
The Supreme Court ruled that federal arbitration law partially overrides California's labor enforcement law, allowing employers to require workers to arbitrate their personal claims separately from group claims — and once those individual claims go to arbitration, the group claims must be dismissed for lack of standing.
The decision reshapes how California workers can pursue labor code violations under the state's Private Attorneys General Act, a law that deputizes employees to sue on the state's behalf to collect civil penalties, and gives employers new tools to limit large-scale labor enforcement suits.
How it got here: A California trial court denied Viking's motion to compel individual arbitration; the California Court of Appeal affirmed; the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Angie Moriana worked as a sales representative for Viking River Cruises and signed an employment contract requiring arbitration of any disputes and waiving the right to bring group or representative claims. After leaving Viking, she filed a lawsuit under California's Private Attorneys General Act — which lets employees sue employers on behalf of the state for labor code violations — alleging Viking violated the law both against her personally and against a wide range of other employees. Viking tried to push her individual claim into arbitration and dismiss the rest.
The question before the Court
Does the federal law protecting arbitration agreements override California's rule that prevents workers from separating their individual labor enforcement claims from broader group claims under the state's Private Attorneys General Act?
The Court's answer
Partly — federal arbitration law does override California's rule against splitting PAGA actions, but it does not require enforcement of a blanket waiver of all PAGA claims.
California's rule said a worker could not be sent to individual arbitration while her group claims stayed in court — the whole PAGA action had to be kept together. The Court found this conflicts with the basic principle that arbitration is a matter of consent: parties cannot be forced to arbitrate claims they never agreed to include. So Viking was entitled, under the severability clause in Moriana's contract, to compel arbitration of her individual claim. Once that claim moved to arbitration, however, Moriana lost the standing California law requires to maintain the group claims in court on her own, so those remaining claims were dismissed.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
California workers who sign arbitration agreements can now be required to resolve their individual labor claims in private arbitration, severed from the sweeping group enforcement suits that PAGA was designed to enable. Employers in California gain significant leverage to limit their exposure from large, aggregated labor penalty actions, while the state's ability to use workers as private enforcers of its labor code is curtailed.
What changes now
The case is sent back to the California courts with Moriana's individual PAGA claim directed to arbitration and her group claims dismissed. California employers with arbitration agreements can now move to split PAGA actions in future cases. California's legislature or courts may respond by modifying PAGA's standing rules or other procedural features to address the gap the ruling created, as Justice Sotomayor's concurrence explicitly noted is within the state's power.
What this does not decide
The ruling does not let employers wipe out PAGA rights entirely. A blanket contractual waiver of all PAGA claims remains unenforceable under California law, which the FAA does not override. The majority's analysis dismissing the group claims rests on current California standing law that the state legislature or courts could modify.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Sotomayor
Justice Sotomayor joined the full majority opinion but wrote separately to highlight what the ruling does not do: California is not powerless to protect its labor enforcement interests. She emphasized that the majority's conclusion that Moriana lacks standing to maintain group claims in court is based on the Court's reading of current California law — and that California courts, in a future appropriate case, could have the final word on that state-law question, or the California Legislature could simply amend PAGA's standing rules.
Concurrence in part — Justice Barrett
Justice Barrett, joined by Justice Kavanaugh (and the Chief Justice except as to the footnote), agreed only with Part III of the majority opinion — the holding that PAGA's joinder device cannot be imposed on arbitration parties — because existing precedent about aggregation devices already compelled that result. She would have gone no further. In her view, the majority's analysis in Parts II and IV was unnecessary to decide the case and improperly resolved disputed state-law questions and arguments that had not been raised or decided in the courts below.
Dissent — Justice Thomas
Justice Thomas dissented on the sole ground that the Federal Arbitration Act does not apply to proceedings in state courts — a position he has long held and adheres to here. Because the FAA imposes no requirements on California courts, he would have affirmed the California Court of Appeal's decision leaving the entire PAGA action intact in state court.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The FAA protects the right to enforce arbitration agreements as written, which means state law cannot impose class-action-style procedures on parties who never agreed to them and cannot coerce people out of arbitration by making it artificially unattractive. These principles form the framework the Court applied to California's PAGA rules.
- The Court rejected the argument that PAGA is simply a class action in disguise. A PAGA plaintiff represents one principal — the state labor agency — which holds many claims, while a class-action plaintiff represents many individuals who each hold their own claims. Because PAGA lacks the certification requirements, adequacy-of-representation review, and opt-out rights that class actions require, the Court's prior class-action-waiver rulings did not automatically apply.
- The Court also rejected the argument that PAGA's representative nature — the plaintiff suing as an agent of the state — automatically conflicts with the FAA's protection of bilateral (two-party) arbitration. Single-principal, single-agent representative suits such as shareholder-derivative suits and trustee actions have long been compatible with arbitration, and the FAA does not require states to make all forms of representative standing waivable by contract.
- The real conflict with the FAA lies in PAGA's built-in joinder device: California law lets any aggrieved employee attach every other labor-code violation affecting every other worker to her personal claim, and forbids the parties from agreeing to arbitrate just the individual claim without the rest. This mechanism lets one side expand the arbitration to cover claims the parties never jointly agreed to submit — violating the FAA's core consent requirement.
- Because that mandatory joinder rule is preempted by the FAA, Viking could enforce the contract's severability clause and send Moriana's individual claim to arbitration. With her personal claim moved out of court, PAGA's own standing rules left Moriana with no basis to continue the group claims in court on her own, and those claims were dismissed.