Monique Olivier 

Monique Olivier was in a workers’ rights clinic in her second year in law school when her interest in representing people suing their employers crystallized. By now, she has been representing plaintiffs in employment matters for 26 years.

It was obvious to the young 2L how important the workplace was to the clinic’s low-income clients. “In America, [work] is such a huge part of our identity,” Olivier said. “Identity, security, stability, health and well-being — so much of it is tied up in how many hours we’re spending at work and what that environment is.”

Just a year ago, she and a Boston colleague secured a $15.35 million settlement for a class of people who had purchased cleaning service franchises from Jani-King, Inc., which Olivier said is the largest commercial cleaning company in the world. The case began in 2009, when a couple came to her firm because after several years of owning a franchise, “there were months where they had to pay the company in order to work,” she said. “As one court said, [it was] more like a glorified Ponzi scheme.”

The settlement was approved last July in a companion case. Chavez v. Jani-King of California, Inc., RG19043517 (Ala. Super. Ct., filed Nov. 15, 2019).

“That, to me, is emblematic of the work that I’ve done,” she said. “We represented ultimately 1,200 janitors throughout California who had purchased these franchises and weren’t making a living wage.”

Another emblematic victory came in January when after a total of 10 years of litigation and appeals, she secured the final order approving a $31 million settlement on behalf of about 2,000 current and former Virgin America flight attendants. One claim against the airline was that it only paid the flight attendants for the time they spent in the air. Bernstein v. Virgin America Inc. 4:15-cv-02277 (N.D. Cal., May 20, 2015).

Olivier was part of the legal team that filed the first big gig-economy misclassification case in California, O’Connor v. Uber, in 2013. But these days, she and co-counsel are filing individual arbitration actions against the ride-share leaders.

“Over the course of the last five years, we’ve filed thousands of individual arbitrations against Lyft and Uber on behalf of drivers,” she said. “And we continue to litigate those. We think that they have value. We think that the workers are owed money for both their wages and their … expenses.”

Olivier is a certified appellate specialist, and she sometimes handles appeals for other employment attorneys. She has ones pending now against PG&E.

She is very proud, however, of her non-employment appellate victory in June. Working with the city’s public defender, she won a ruling that San Francisco taxpayers may sue the superior court to prioritize criminal cases. Raju v. Superior Court, 2023 DJDAR 5622 (Cal. App. 1st Dist., dec’d June 8, 2023).

— Don DeBenedictis