Employment lawyers and human resources professionals regularly preach that managers must document employee performance issues as a best practice so that if/when that manager wants to terminate the employee, the company has the “receipts” to justify the decision. Suppose that the employee later sues for age discrimination. He may be…
(At least I didn’t say, “It depends.”) Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employers from retaliating against employees who oppose a practice that Title VII forbids, such as discrimination or fostering a hostile work environment based on race, color, national origin, sex, or religion. An internal…
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,…
Spoiler alert: it often doesn’t end well for the plaintiff or their lawyer. For example, let’s discuss this Second Circuit decision in which a plaintiff had sued her employer and two of its employees, asserting claims of sexual harassment during and retaliatory discharge from her employment. For a time, it…
Let’s explore whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects employees against accusations of racism. The inspiration for today’s post comes from a recent Georgia federal court decision. The plaintiff in this case, a white woman, claimed that the defendant had falsely accused her of calling a…
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,…
Right or wrong, an honest belief may be all it takes to proffer a nondiscriminatory reason for an adverse employment action. Do you remember that employer that terminated 65 employees seeking FMLA simultaneously with the same doctor’s notes? The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that the company suspected shenanigans,…
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…
Recently, I read a recent federal appellate court decision involving an employee with a rare form of Tourette Syndrome that caused him to use obscenities and racial slurs. While that could be dicey around coworkers, this employee’s job required excellent customer service skills while making deliveries and interacting with said customers.…
Photo by Brett Sayles: https://www.pexels.com/photo/slogan-black-lives-matter-on-black-board-4665903/ Last week, the National Labor Relations Board decided that a NON-union employer cannot require employees to remove “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) insignia from their work uniform when the BLM marking is a “logical outgrowth” of earlier group protests about racial discrimination in their workplace. So,…