A man walks into a job interview. Years earlier, he sustained an injury that caused him to walk with a limp and requires him to extend his leg when seated. He had applied for one of the company’s open positions. And since he satisfied the minimum experiential and educational requirements,…
Yesterday, the Department of Labor announced that a Pennsylvania federal court awarded $35.8 million in overtime back wages and liquidated damages to 6,000 current and former workers across fifteen facilities in what it claims to be “one of nation’s largest FLSA judgments.” In its Findings of Fact and Conclusions of…
Do you remember that scene from Rounders, right after Mike McDermott spots Teddy KGB’s poker “tell,” when Teddy laments, “Hanging around…hanging around… kid’s got alligator blood. Can’t get rid of him.“? It feels that way, with the Federal Trade Commission’s non-compete Rule imposing a comprehensive ban on new non-competes with…
With most eyes focused on a pending lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania to eliminate the FTC’s noncompete ban, local employers may have missed the news last week that Governor Shapiro signed into law a measure restricting the use of non-competition agreements in…
Yesterday, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced that a Pennsylvania-based construction company will pay $50,000 and furnish other relief to settle a retaliation lawsuit. According to the EEOC, a human resources manager received and subsequently investigated a complaint of sexual harassment against the company’s general manager. The EEOC alleged…
Earlier this month, a federal appellate court addressed a few situations involving retaliation claims in the workplace in which parties (and sometimes courts) may misapply the law, namely, Title VII of the Civil Rights of 1964. So, let’s clear this up. A retaliation claim has three elements: a protected activity,…
An employer recently learned the hard way that a proper response to an employee’s complaint of harassment involves more than simply investigating it. I’ll explain. Last night, I read a recent decision from a Pennsylvania federal judge. The plaintiff, an Asian American, testified at his deposition that his supervisor often…
The words “cisgender” or “non-transgender” employee appear nowhere in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the federal workplace law that outlaws gender discrimination. But, according to a Pennsylvania federal judge, “that does not preclude the possibility that discrimination against both a cisgender male and cisgender female may…
Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons I read a recent NJ federal court decision where a plaintiff began working for the defendant in New Jersey but later requested and received a transfer to Pennsylvania. And that’s when things went awry. The plaintiff alleged that, at an operation leadership meeting,…
Earlier this week, I wrote about a judge calling out an employee for trying to cast a personal choice to remain unvaccinated against COVID-19 as some deeply religious decision. Last night, I read another recent opinion from a federal judge who called an employee trying to avoid a mandatory vaccination requirement…