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Constructive discharge is a high bar. But an ultimatum, delivered the wrong way and on the wrong timeline, can be enough to clear it.

That was the lesson from a recent federal court decision involving a pregnant employee who was told she could either keep working under at-will conditions or take six weeks of pay and leave immediately. The employer framed it as a choice. The court said a jury could see it as no choice at all. Continue reading

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When employees say, “You helped him when he was injured but refused to help me,” it sounds like discrimination. It also sounds like a failure-to-accommodate dispute. A recent Ninth Circuit decision shows why that framing matters, and why getting it wrong can sink the case before it ever reaches a jury. Continue reading

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Stop me if you’ve heard this before: it’s the Monday after the Super Bowl, an employee with approved intermittent FMLA leave asks for a personal day, gets denied, switches to FMLA, and later finds himself terminated for “abuse.”

That is not a hypothetical. It is essentially what happened in a recent decision out of the Southern District of West Virginia, where a federal court refused to throw out an employee’s FMLA retaliation claim and sent the case to a jury. Continue reading

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Me? I probably would not tell the EEOC that I removed a Black employee from work because of her “introduction of race” into the workplace. Especially after she complained about race discrimination triggered by a question about attending a Black Lives Matter protest.

But that is exactly what happened here.

And it is exactly why the employer lost on retaliation at summary judgment. Continue reading

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Pay equity disputes are rarely about a single salary decision. They turn on whether an employer’s explanation for a pay gap holds together once the facts are examined.

A recent Seventh Circuit decision shows how reorganizations that blend promotions and transfers into the same role can expose cracks in that explanation. Continue reading

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In Groundhog Day, the problem isn’t that the day repeats. It’s that nothing changes. At one point, Phil Connors captures the frustration perfectly: “What if there is no tomorrow? There wasn’t one today.”

That same problem shows up when employers investigate complaints about a supervisor, conclude the conduct is not actionable, and then respond the same way each time the issue resurfaces. Continue reading

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