Pennsylvania

Third Circuit says VIPs cannot sue for Title VII discrimination

May 1, 2013 | by Eric B. Meyer

Robert Mariotti was the vice-president and secretary of the company his father founded. Not only was he a corporate officer, but Mariotti also served as a member of the board of directors, and was a shareholder who could only be fired for cause.

In 1995, Mariotti had a spiritual awakening, which he claims resulted in a resulted in “a systematic pattern of antagonism” toward him in the form of “negative, hostile and/or humiliating statements” about him and his religious affiliation. Mariotti claimed that this behavior ramped up for over a decade and, ultimately, resulted in his termination. Thereafter, he sued his former employer for religious discrimination. The company moved to dismiss the claim on the basis that a shareholder-director-officer is not an “employee” under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and, thus, has no standing to assert a claim for religious discrimination.

What happened you say? Well, even if you read the lede, click through for full analysis…

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Employee caught in a pick, Supreme Court scratches her FLSA claims

April 17, 2013 | by Eric B. Meyer

** drops microphone, walks off stage **

Fine, I’ll play a quick encore.

Are Flounder from Animal House and Left Ear from The Italian Job “disabled”?

April 4, 2013 | by Eric B. Meyer

– “Mr. Dorfman?”
– “Hello!”
– “0.2… Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son.”

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– “That’s Left Ear. Demolition and explosives. When he was ten, he put one too many M-80s in the toilet bowl. Lost the hearing in his right ear. He’s been blowing stuff up ever since.”

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Good start to a blog post, amirite? Now, allow me to dork this up with two employment-law questions:

If Flounder were Dean Wormer’s employee (rather than just a student at Faber College), would Wormer’s calling him “stupid” mean that Faber regarded Flounder as “disabled” under the Americans with Disabilities Act?

Since Left Ear is deaf in one ear, would he qualify as “disabled” under the ADA should he return from his Spanish villa and seek gainful employment in the USA?

Tough questions. But here, at the ole Handbook, when the going gets tough…[wait for it]…The tough get goin’! Who’s with me?

Let’s do it!!!! (after the jump…)

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That’s what he said: The infamous Eagle v. Morgan LinkedIn case is ovah!

March 15, 2013 | by Eric B. Meyer

On March 12, a federal court in PA resolved the first HUGE LinkedIn account dispute case involving an employee and former employer. I’ve written about out it a few times previously. (Here, here,and here).

The latest decision is involved. And rather than pontificate — too many syllables — I’ll defer to Venkat Balasubramani, who has the full scoop here.

My laziness knows no ends. Unless those ends involve a medium-rare burger, wrapped in bacon.

In 77 tweets, what employers can learn about EEOC enforcement #EEOCHR

March 7, 2013 | by Eric B. Meyer

I had two topics on the brain to blog about:

Whether, under the Americans with Disabilities Act, being on time is an essential function of the job. Fortunately, Daniel Schwartz addressed that yesterday here at the Connecticut Employment Law Blog.
As a follow-up to yesterday’s wage-and-hour / Daylight Savings Time post, exploring how DST impacts tracking intermittent leave taken under the Family and Medical Leave Act.

{Go take a bath right now to cleanse yourself of the employment-law dorkness that hit you from reading No. 2}

Instead, after the jump, I have, well, you read the title to this post. These are my tweets (and several retweets) from the “EEOC Overview and HR Mixer” I attended yesterday — hashtag #ubernerd #EEOCHR

{Better grab the soap and turn on that bath again. You’ve been warned.}

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Pennsylvania nears a game-changing whistleblower-law amendment

February 11, 2013 | by Eric B. Meyer

Can you blow my whistle baby, whistle baby.
Let me know.
Girl I’m gonna show you how to do it.
And we start real slow.
You just put your lips together.
And you come real close.
Can you blow my whistle baby, whistle baby?
Here we go.

Concerned with the limited scope of Pennsylvania’s Whistleblower Law, the existential activist Flo Rida wrote the 2012 hit Whistle to raise awareness and trigger a potentially huge change in the law.

{Editor’s Note: No he didn’t. Not at all.}

New bill in PA would prohibit unemployment discrimination

January 31, 2013 | by Eric B. Meyer

In 2011, New Jersey passed a law banning discrimination against the unemployed. Will PA follow suit in 2013?

The ball is rolling….

The PA House introduced its own unemployment-discrimination bill on January 22, 2013, and you can view a copy of it here.

Who are YOU to tell ME that I’m not offended by sexual harassment?!?

January 16, 2013 | by Eric B. Meyer

The original working title for the post was “The Third Circuit takes a deuce on my ‘Pottymouths’ post.” I meant it in the figurative sense. Otherwise, I would be at a loss for words with IT.

More so than usual…

{Napalms browser history}

But, fortunately, good taste and high morals — we’re all about that here at the Handbook {cough} {fart} — prevailed.

Click through to see what a federal appellate court had to say about whether a female plaintiff with an apparent propensity for the cursey-cursey may successfully pursue her sexual-harassment claims.

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Boy meets girl, dates girl, breaks up, calls girl “whore,” gets fired, sues for discrimination

November 30, 2012 | by Eric B. Meyer

Image credit: atom.smasher.org, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

When a male employee texted his female co-worker and former girlfriend that she was a “whore” and later ignored two protective orders that the female co-worker had taken out against him, I wonder if he was thinking, “Maybe, I’ll get fired and parlay that into a winning reverse-gender-discrimination claim.”

Indeed, the guy’s actions violated a number of work rules and, ultimately, resulted in his termination. But a winning reverse-gender-discrimination claim? Not so much according to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals (opinion here):

It’s not disability discrimination when you don’t know about the disability.

November 2, 2012 | by Eric B. Meyer

William Wengert is HIV-positive. He worked as a certified nursing assistant for Phoebe Ministries, until he was terminated last year following an incident in which a resident suffered a broken leg. The company claimed that the incident with the resident precipitated the firing. Conversely, Wengert alleged that the company violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by terminating him because of his HIV-positive status.

Now, let’s pause there for a second. I think we can all agree that just because a disabled employee — unquestionably, being HIV-positive is an ADA-disability — is fired, does not mean that the employer has violated the ADA. There could be many legitimate business reasons that could trigger an adverse employment actions (e.g., $$$, performance, discipline, etc.).

Legitimate business reasons aside, the Wengert Court (opinion here) highlighted that “disabilities are often unknown to the employer.” Therefore, “the requirement that plaintiff show he is disabled implies a requirement that the plaintiff show employer knew of employee’s disability.” In Wengert, the plaintiff could not demonstrate that anyone involved in his firing knew that he was HIV-positive. Therefore, Wengert’s disability could not have motivated his termination. Thus, no disability discrimination.