Legal Question in Employment Law in California

Re: Receiving pay, good reference after termination

Based upon your fact summary, it appears that you do not have a claim for wrongful discharge. You may want to discuss this matter in detail with a labor/employment attorney to explore any potential statute based claims.

Your wage claim should be filed with the State Labor Commissioner, Department of Industrial Relations, Division of Labor Standards Enforcement. Check your phone book under California State Agencies for your local office. You will be entitled to waiting time penalties under Labor Code Section 202 and 203 of your daily wage multiplied by the number of days until payment of final wages, up to a maximum of 30.

As to you job reference, You may not want to misrepresent, either affirmatively or by omission any facts on a job application. Doing so could result in many problems. I would consider requesting a review of your personnel file to determine the existence of any adverse information. If such exists, you have two options: (1) you can be prepared for it in interviews and address it with your version of the facts. However, if you wish to be a bit more proactive, you could direct a letter to the employer indicating that you have reviewed the file and dispute the adverse information and that any unauthorized disclosure of that disputed information may result in legal action. Of course if there is no adverse information in the file you can do nothing, or write a letter indicating that since there is no adverse info in the file, you would expect that any reference responses will reflect that.

That being said, you may also first want to inquire whether the employer provides job references and if so, what info is disclosed. Many employers limit the data to date of hire, date of separation, job classification and wage rate. If that is the case with your former employer, you may want to do nothing.

Re: Receiving pay, good reference after termination

As you are probably aware, as an at will employee you can be fired for any reason as long as it is not against public policy such as race, religion, sexual preference, etc. These items are often difficult to prove. The only other potential would be if the employer has an employment policy and it violated its own procedures for termination. Without the employment policy, I could not evaluate that issue. With respect to your last paycheck, that should have been paid at the time you were terminated. You should go to the labor board and make a claim. Unfortuantely, they do not have "nighttime" hours. You may be entitled to late pay penalties for the delay which could be significant (relatively). With respect to the reference, without more facts, it is unclear. Since you have a day job, and if you had prior bar tender jobs, maybe you could just leave it off. Obviously, you can not do something that misleads or deny having worked at the place, but depending on the timing, maybe it can be massaged appropriately.