Yesterday, I read a press release in the EEOC’s Virtual Newsroom announcing the resolution of a retaliation lawsuit. In my twenty-plus years of practicing employment law, I didn’t recall seeing retaliation claims quite like this one. According to the EEOC’s lawsuit, the general manager complained to the company’s Acting Chief…
In 2022, Florida passed The Individual Freedom Act. But most people know this law as the “Stop W.O.K.E. Act,” which stands for “Stop the Wrongs to our Kids and Employees.” Whatever we call it, the Act says employers cannot subject “any individual, as a condition of employment,” to “training, instruction,…
On Saturday, the Palestinian militant group Hamas carried out a surprise attack in Israel that reportedly left over 900 dead. Israel has since responded with a declaration of war. What does this Middle East conflict have to do with employment law? You have Jewish employees. Antisemitism is rising, and the…
According to reports, a pharmaceutical company fired one of its senior talent acquisition specialists last week after she appeared in a viral video on a New Jersey Transit train calling a small group of German men “f—ing immigrants and telling them to “get the f— out of our country.” An…
Today, we will have a lesson on the differences between “direct” and “circumstantial” evidence of discrimination. Plaintiffs may prove discrimination through direct evidence, circumstantial evidence, or both. Circumstantial evidence allows the factfinder to infer discrimination. For example, a company fires a black employee for sleeping on the job but doesn’t…
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? I don’t intend this blog post to answer that question specifically. However, there is an employment law analogy that I will address today. Plaintiffs alleging they suffered a hostile work…
On Friday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill to prohibit discrimination based on an individual’s texture or style of hair with a vote of 235-189. It’s called the “Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair Act of 2022” or the “CROWN Act of 2022,” and you…
It wasn’t long ago that the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission noticed a spike in reports of mistreatment and harassment of Asian Americans and other people of Asian descent during the COVID-19 pandemic. Before that, when many Americans clamored for a wall on the southern border, Hispanic workers in the…
Nicolas Ettlin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons You (soft) served up one pun too many, Eric. Geez! I might have blown my chance at drafting press releases for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Then again, anything is popsicle when you’re the cream of the crop. Yeah, that’d be…
Rachel Malehorn / CC BY Welcome back to “Amy Coney Barrett Week” at The Employer Handbook. I’m devoting five blog posts to some of her most significant employment law decisions so that, maybe, we can read the tea leaves to see how she may rule from the Supreme Court bench…