The plaintiff in this federal court decision I read last night didn’t exactly come off as a model employee. According to the decision, others reported that the plaintiff, a security officer and transportation driver, took extended lunch breaks, made unauthorized stops while making product deliveries (including a car dealership to purchase a…
This will all make sense in a minute if you keep reading. The plaintiff is dealt a tough hand. As the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals put it in this decision I read last night, the plaintiff was “dealt a tough hand.” In less than a month, her father fell…
If, like me, you deal with HR compliance and employment law issues regularly, you’ve yelled the title of this blog post at others. (And if you don’t deal with HR compliance and employment law issues regularly, dude, WTH are you doing here?) I thought of this last night as I…
Yesterday, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) released a technical assistance document, “Assessing Adverse Impact in Software, Algorithms, and Artificial Intelligence Used in Employment Selection Procedures Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” which is focused on preventing discrimination against job seekers and workers. EEOC Chair Charlotte…
Is it age bias? Or just business? In a decision I read last night, the plaintiff spent more than two decades working as a system technician for the defendant. According to the defendant, it made a business decision to terminate all employees holding the plaintiff’s position because of COVID-19 and…
Last night, I read a decision from a federal court in New York involving a plaintiff, who is Jewish, who claimed that her employer and her supervisor discriminated against her based on her religion. The plaintiff identified many incidents that, in her view, demonstrate bias against her as a Jewish…
While recognizing the prevalence of automated systems, including those sometimes marketed as “artificial intelligence” or “AI,” and the “insights and breakthroughs, increasing efficiencies and cost-savings” that AI can offer, four federal agencies recently announced in a joint statement that they are ready to police “unlawful bias,” “unlawful discrimination,” and “other…
Employment lawyers and HR professionals generally preach that employees view “it’s not a good fit” to explain their termination of employment as code for discrimination or retaliation. It’s HR101. But yesterday, a federal court of appeals explained that this well-intentioned but often misconstrued rationale isn’t always a thinly-veiled, pretextual excuse…
So when the plaintiff in this federal court decision I read last night cited as evidence of her employer’s heterosexual animus that her gay coworker received a cake and party by gay supervisors on his 30th work anniversary, whereas she did not receive cake or party for the same occasion,…
On April 10, 2023, Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Amul R. Thapar offered his two cents on the role the federal courts should have in second-guessing the business judgment of companies making hiring decisions: Ignoring decades of precedent, the majority opinion imposes a rule requiring employers to favor credentials over relevant…