Summary
A California Court of Appeal held that Cal/OSHA can issue and enforce an administrative subpoena to investigate a worker's death even when the company insists the worker was an independent contractor rather than an employee. The agency gets to investigate the employment question for itself, and waiting out a citation deadline won't make the demand disappear. The one real limit the court imposed is that the records demanded still have to be relevant to the investigation.
A worker dies on the job. A state safety agency wants to know what happened. You believe that worker was an independent contractor rather than your employee, so you decide the agency has no business in your files and you refuse its subpoena. A California appellate court just explained, in unsparing terms, why that decision is a trap.
The case is Division of Occupational Safety and Health v. Uber Technologies, Inc. (Cal. Ct. App., 2d Dist., June 18, 2026). Dino Park made deliveries through Uber Eats. In May 2023, after dropping off an order, he fell down a flight of stairs and died of his injuries days later. Cal/OSHA, the state agency responsible for workplace safety, carries a mandatory duty to investigate on-the-job deaths. It asked Uber for a meeting. Uber said no. So the agency issued an administrative subpoena, a regulator’s formal demand for records that doesn’t require filing a lawsuit first, seeking twenty categories of documents about Park’s work and how he died. Uber produced nothing and stood on a single theory: Park was an independent contractor under Proposition 22, the 2020 ballot measure that lets app-based drivers be treated as contractors when certain conditions hold, so the agency had no jurisdiction over it. The trial court ordered Uber to produce everything. Uber appealed.
Why the Subpoena Survived
Uber’s core argument had a surface logic. If Cal/OSHA only regulates employees, and Park was no employee, then the agency should have to establish employment before demanding a single page, perhaps in a separate lawsuit filed for that purpose. The court took that logic apart. An agency can issue a subpoena precisely to find out whether the target falls within its reach in the first place. As the court put it, drawing on decades of authority, a regulator may investigate on nothing more than a suspicion the law is being broken, or even just to satisfy itself that it isn’t. Forcing Cal/OSHA to win the contractor fight before it could investigate would invert the whole purpose of the subpoena, which was to gather the very facts that answer that question.
Two backup arguments fared no better. Uber claimed the subpoena power operates only during an on-site workplace inspection. The statute says no such thing, and the court refused to read in a limit the Legislature never wrote. Uber then argued that once the agency issued a citation carrying a small penalty, the subpoena went moot, meaning the live dispute was over. Wrong again. The six-month deadline Uber leaned on governs citations, not investigative subpoenas. Read Uber’s way, a company could simply stall until the clock ran out, and courts don’t hand businesses that kind of escape hatch.
The Limit That Matters
Uber didn’t walk away empty-handed. The trial court had ordered all twenty categories produced without cutting one, and several reached far past Park. Some swept in records on every “user” of the platform, a definition wide enough to scoop up ordinary customers. The court couldn’t see how customer data illuminated a delivery driver’s death, so it reversed that piece and sent the case back to trim the demands to what’s actually relevant. The point cuts both ways. A regulator’s investigative power runs broad, and it still has a floor, and that floor is relevance.
What This Means for Employers and Platform Companies
The classification label on your workforce won’t wall off an investigation into whether the label is right. That call belongs to the agency first, and a subpoena built to make it is enforceable. For gig and platform businesses, Proposition 22 may govern the ultimate question of who counts as an employee, but it doesn’t stop an agency from investigating whether the conditions for contractor status are even met. And for any company staring down a regulatory demand, stonewalling is the weakest hand at the table. The move that actually worked for Uber wasn’t refusing to engage. It was engaging, then fighting the demand on scope.
Bottom Line
The moment to call counsel is when the agency first makes contact, not after a judge has ordered you to comply. By then the only argument left, that the demand sweeps too far, arrives with your credibility already spent getting there. There’s real room to narrow an overbroad investigation. There’s almost none to argue the agency can’t investigate at all. Horst Legal Counsel advises businesses on regulatory investigations, worker classification, and the decisions that land the day an agency comes knocking. If you’d rather know where your company stands before that day, let’s talk.