Sabrina A. Beldner 

Sabrina A. Beldner had a very good February. That month she finally sent a potential class action to individual arbitration after four years of litigation. She defeated an unfair labor practice charge for another client. And she received a labor arbitrator’s ruling upholding a third client’s right to terminate an employee accused of racist activity.

Then in May, she scored another unusual win.

Beldner chairs her firm’s labor and employment department, and she enjoys working in both areas. “It’s really a treat for me because I get to work on such varied matters,” she said. She especially enjoys labor arbitration hearings because they are “minitrials on someone’s termination” conducted with minimal preparation. “You just show up … and you have to adapt to it on the fly,” she said.

Last year, she represented an oil and gas company that fired a worker it found had a small brown doll in a noose hanging from his rearview mirror. During the hearing, conducted over Zoom, the worker claimed the doll was originally white and had merely darkened from 30 years of sun exposure.

“I led him down this path,” Beldner said. She had him verify that the doll had been in his car all that time with the same piece of rope around its neck. Then she said: “Do me a favor. Take the noose off the doll.

“He unwrapped the noose, and the doll was the exact same color underneath,” she said. “That was the end of it for him.”

She had another satisfying victory representing a shipping and logistics company sued in a putative wage-and-hour class action by the terminated employee of a staffing agency the company used. But the plaintiff never identified the staffing agency until the sixth version of his complaint.

Beldner’s team retrieved his employment documents from the agency, which indeed contained a mandatory arbitration provision and which the trial court enforced. Parsittie v. Schneider Logistics, Inc., 2:19-cv-03981 (C.D. Cal., filed May 7, 2019).

She did represent a staffing agency in her third victory from February, an unfair labor practice charge filed by a temporary worker who claimed he was fired for raising safety concerns during the pandemic. While NLRB offices tend to be pro-worker, in this case the board found unequivocally for both employers, Beldner said.

Three months later, she and her team actually used a court’s adverse ruling to defeat a wage-and-hour class action brought by Dollar General store managers. The court had ruled that her client waived its right to seek arbitration against the main named plaintiff. But then Beldner argued that since that plaintiff was no longer covered by the arbitration agreement, he no longer was typical of the class since 98% of them were bound.

Beldner noted that many people work with and help her. She called her success this year “a tribute to my team.”

— Don DeBenedictis