When an employee complains about discrimination or unethical business practices, there’s often a concern that they’ll construe any subsequent adverse employment action as retaliation. Continue reading
In 2015, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission determined that a federal agency that denied an employee equal access to a common bathroom/facility corresponding to the employee’s gender identity discriminated based on sex and could not restrict a transgender employee to a single-user restroom. About five years later, the Supreme Court ruled that discrimination based on transgender status is sex discrimination in violation of Title VII.
Yesterday, the EEOC announced a lawsuit against several employers claiming that forbidding transgender workers from using restrooms consistent with their gender identity contributed to a hostile work environment based on their sex.
Continue reading
André Koehne, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Early in my career, I learned that it’s bad form for a lawyer to accuse another party of having “lied.” Judges generally frown upon this.
So, you can imagine that my interest was piqued when I read an Eighth Circuit decision issued yesterday weighing “the appropriate sanction for a plaintiff who lied in a deposition and withheld information.”
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. Continue reading
The common logic is that firing an employee shortly after complaining about workplace discrimination isn’t a good look. Continue reading
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.
The hostess at an Asian-American restaurant in Chicago, Illinois, was employed in that role for about two years.
Two years the restaurant probably wishes it could have back. Continue reading
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. Continue reading
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. Continue reading
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