Public employees who are terminated after they blow the whistle on illegal 
conduct often have the opportunity to appeal their termination to some type of board or officer. That entity in turn usually has the authority to either rule on their claims or to make a recommendation to a civil service agency regarding whether the termination should be upheld or not. These proceedings hold out the promise of swift justice-a hearing and a decision by an impartial fact-finder in a relatively short amount of time. In practice, however, they rarely result in any type of reinstatement or fairness.
Public employees who make use of these appeals often find that when they try to bring their claims in court, where they have a better chance of getting a fair shake, the public entity argues that they are barred (“precluded”) from suing because they already had a hearing as part of the appeal process. In other words, public entities try to block public employees from suing just because the public employees make use of the civil service appeal process (which, as described above, is rarely fair or impartial).
That was the case in Bahra v. City of San Bernardino (9th Cir. 2019) Case No. 18-55789. Mr. Bahra, the plaintiff, worked as a social services practitioner for San Bernardino County in the Department of Children and Family Services (“CFS”). He discovered that a particular foster home was abusing children, but that CFS’s database did not reflect that history because of a series or database mistakes. He then reported these errors to his manager. Continue reading “Public Employee Whistleblowers Have Important Rights in California under Labor Code section 1102.5”
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