Rodney S. Diggs 

Rodney S. Diggs has been a successful plaintiffs’ employment and civil rights litigator for almost a decade. Now, he can also claim to be one of the very few experts on suing Indian casinos in California for employment discrimination.

He and co-counsel won a $900,000 award for their client in what they feel sure is the very first such discrimination claim ever arbitrated under a relatively new amendment to the agreement between the state of California and the Morongo Band of Mission Indians setting out the rules for operating the band’s casino.

His client was a dealer and floor supervisor at the Morongo casino near Palm Springs. When she developed hip and joint problems, she needed to use a cane. But her employers wouldn’t let her. “In fact, they sent her home because she came to work with her cane,” Diggs said. When she complained about it later, they terminated her.

As it happened, the woman’s brother had gone to law school with one of Diggs’s partners, but he didn’t handle employment litigation. Diggs took the case around 2000, a little after the state and the tribe added an amendment called Ordinance 40 to their formal Morongo Gaming Operations, Employment, Discrimination, Harassment and Retaliation Ordinance.

Under the amendment, casino employees with those kinds of complaints could bring them before the Morongo Gaming Agency and, if it approved, then take their case to arbitration, Diggs said.

Prior to the amendment, “people would try to file lawsuits, but the courts would dismiss them because there was no jurisdiction,” he said.

This arbitration was held at the Morongo facility, and the arbitrator selected was UCLA Law School Indian law expert Carole E. Goldberg, who has served as the chief justice on two different Indian tribal courts.

To Diggs, all that suggested he and his client were “up a hill with no creek,” but Goldberg ruled for his client.

“This is the first of its kind,” he said. “It opens up the doors for a lot of employees to bring forth meritorious claims against the various casinos on the reservations for violations of their rights.”

Diggs won another notable victory recently. On July 22 last year, a unanimous jury awarded his client $25 million, virtually all of it as compensatory damages — “which is unheard of against a school district,” he said. Ross v. Bassett Unified School District, 19STCV22820 (L.A. Super. Ct., filed June 28, 2019).

Diggs had won a racial harassment and discrimination action against the district for the same client, a teacher. But the district “basically terminated him two weeks after the case was settled.”

The parties are scheduled to argue posttrial motions in about a week. Those took a year, Diggs said, because the defendants tried to disqualify the judge, “which was not a good move on their part.” The appellate court denied the request. Diggs intends to seek $4 million in fees.

— Don DeBenedictis