Winning a retaliation lawsuit against an employer isn’t easy. The plaintiff-employee must prove three elements: she engaged in a protected activity; the defendant-employer took an employment action adverse to the plaintiff; and there was a causal connection between the protected activity and the adverse employment action. A journalist at a…
Think of all the personal, sensitive information that an individual shares with you just to have the opportunity to earn a living as an employee of your company. As part of onboarding, new employees provide their home address, social security number, bank and financial account numbers for direct deposit, insurance…
The surprise will quickly disappear once I share the facts from this recent Third Circuit decision. The plaintiff was a patient representative with a local hospital. On January 3, 2014, he reported to work amid a snowstorm. After his shift ended, the plaintiff slipped and fell while searching for a…
Like saying, “It depends,” you can count on a lawyer blogging about cannabis and employment law to drop a marijuana pun in the title of the post. Legal recreational cannabis and its impact at work. In early 2021, New Jersey legalized recreational marijuana for adults 21 and older when Governor…
Credit: Office of Commissioner Andrea R. Lucas Late last week, as I enjoyed the FisherBroyles partner retreat (responsibly-ish) in Nashville, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission released a new resource on pregnancy discrimination. Spoiler alert: The Dallas Cowboys won’t make the playoffs this season resource doesn’t contain any game-changing new…
Jerk employees are responsible for creating most of the hostile work environment claims I get hired to defend. But companies must act quickly to prevent workplace discrimination, regardless of the source. A new lawsuit that the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission just filed serves as a good reminder for employers.…
Selfishly, a professional perk of a changing White House administration is the business that follows from counseling clients on the new rules when administrative agencies change their rules. For example, as a holdover from the Trump Administration, the Republican majority at the National Labor Relations Board implemented a new joint-employer rule.…
An HR employee claimed that her age motivated her employer’s decision not to select her for a Human Resources Talent Consultant (HRTC) position after the company restructured the HR Department. Why? Because decision-makers allegedly said on a conference call that they were looking for “fresh new blood” to fill the…
I read a recent Sixth Circuit decision. A physician group fired the plaintiff, a nurse, months after she suffered an accident. The group’s subsequent bankruptcy impeded the plaintiff’s efforts to hold it liable for employment discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA). Did that stop her from…
Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Labor announced that an investigation into a Japanese restaurant had uncovered violations of federal wage and hour laws, resulting in 75 servers, sushi, and hibachi chefs not receiving all of their legally earned wages. The final bill was $171,834. That’s a lot of…