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…
I’ve drafted plenty of employee separation agreements. Many of them include non-disparagement provisions. Some of them include a mutual non-disparagement provision. But that mutuality is somewhat illusory. For example, in this recent case, the employer and its former employee agreed that the employee would not disparage the employer (among others),…
…the plaintiff missed the mark. Badly. On the plus side, I get a blog post out of it. Direct vs. Circumstantial Evidence When employees lose their jobs and claim discrimination, there are two types of evidence they can use to prove their case: direct and circumstantial. Direct evidence of discrimination…
At a bench trial in a Virginia federal court in 2021, with only a Family and Medical Leave Act interference at stake, the judge concluded, “[I]t’s obvious that there is definitely liability because there was clearly a violation of the FMLA. I mean, there’s just no question about it.” But…
About three years ago, seven plant managers lost their jobs following an investigation into allegations of betting on how many workers there would get sick from the coronavirus. Shortly before losing their jobs, a handful did not receive a bonus they felt the company improperly withheld. So they sued. What…
Yes, soon after I start recycling old blog posts next month about the liability risks that employees and their poor costume choices present for employers, all private-sector employers with 100 or more employees and federal contractors with 50 or more employees meeting specific criteria can start submitting demographic workforce data,…
A company fired one of its employees just ten days after learning about his disability. Although the proximity between the two doesn’t confirm that the employee’s disability motivated the employer’s decision, some other vital factors led a federal appellate court to overrule a lower court’s decision in favor of the…
The Americans with Disabilities Act makes it unlawful for an employer to discriminate against a qualified applicant or employee with a disability. According to a lawsuit that the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed yesterday, an employer did both. To the same individual. Here’s more from the EEOC press release:…
Screenshot: @elonmusk on X At least that’s what Elon Musk, the billionaire who purchased X (formerly known as Twitter), posted from his X account on Saturday night. He also vowed that there is “no limit” to the funding. Neither Musk nor X has provided further details on the offer, such…
Tomorrow, I’ll be presenting “Weeding through the Haze: State and Federal Marijuana Laws and Implications” at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s 2023 EXCEL Training Conference in Washington, DC. Between now and then, I’ll need to update my slide deck. That’s because, last week, Congressman Jamie Raskin (MD-08) and Congresswoman…