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The Employer Handbook Blog
Articles Posted in Discrimination and Unlawful Harassment
Final Score: HIPAA 1 – Retaliation 0
See how a federal appellate court shut out a plaintiff’s claims of retaliation after she was fired for forwarding confidential documents to herself, purportedly to preserve evidence for an age-discrimination lawsuit filed by a former coworker.
What I did there, you see that?
After the jump…
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Same-sex training. Ok or discrimination?
According to the EEOC, if men can only train men, and women only women, that may be discrimination.
But, let’s see what a federal court has to say about that after the jump…
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Court: Title VII prohibits retaliation based on good-faith complaint of sexual-orientation harassment
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination based on a number of protected classes. Sexual orientation isn’t one of those protected classes specifically listed in the statute.
So, if an employee complains about sexual-orientation harassment and is later fired because she complained, then that won’t create a claim under Title VII. Or does it?
Find out after the jump…
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Will the EEOC become more employer-friendly in the Fall?
*** whistles ***
The word on the street according to Kevin McGowan at Bloomberg/BNA (here $$$) is that U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chair Jacqueline A. Berrien (D) has decided not to seek renomination to the EEOC.
Originally an Obama recess-appointment, the Senate confirmed Ms. Berrien as EEOC Chair in December 2010. Her term expired on July 1, 2014, but she is permitted to retain her seat until September 1, 2014.
An employer-defendant argued that cancer — CANCER!!! — is not an ADA disability
How do you think that worked out? (I’ve got a pretty good guess too).
After the jump, let’s see if we’re right.
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Court says having to pee uncontrollably is not an ADA disability
Talk about a pissed-off plaintiff.
I’ll be here all week. (Thank God it’s Friday).
More on this interesting Americans with Disabilities Act decision after the jump…
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Guess why dude lost his ADA failure-to-accommodate claim. (Hint: he didn’t ask for one).
When the new amendments to the the Americans with Disabilities Act took effect in 2009, the law became more employee-friendly by expanding the definition of what constitutes a disability.
That said, the law doesn’t (yet) require an employer to have a sixth sense about whether a disabled employee requires a reasonable accommodation.
Generally, an employee has to ask for it. Or, as we find out after the jump, an ADA failure-to-accommodate lawsuit is pretty much doomed.
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Learn all about religious accommodations in the workplace today at 2:00 PM EDT
Why, just the other night, I playing my 5-year-old son in a friendly game of Uno.
Well, it was friendly-ish in a cutthroat sorta way. At least, that’s what the look on his tear-stained face suggested to me when I mouthed “Uno,” shimmied, and spiked my final card to win my fourth game in a row.
Now, some would say that I took it a bit too far when I collected his tears, and then painted them on my face to mock his crying.