Supreme Court Issues Important Decision in Discrimination Case
In Staub v. Proctor Hospital, the US Supreme Court just issued an important unanimous decision in this military-service-based discrimination case. This case concerns the so-called “cat’s paw” theory of liability, under which one supervisor acts with discriminatory intent against the plaintiff, but the plaintiff is actually fired by another supervisor. The case arose under the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA), which protects members of the military from workplace discrimination based on their military position or service. The Court held...
Read MoreSupreme Court Endorses Associational Retaliation Claim
Late last month, in Thompson v. North American Stainless, the Supreme Court unanimously concluded that firing a worker’s fiancé in retaliation for a sex discrimination claim filed by the worker is itself unlawful retaliation under Title VII. The anti-retaliation provision of Title VII prohibits any employer action that “well might have dissuaded a reasonable worker from making or supporting a charge of discrimination.” The Court had little trouble concluding that “a reasonable worker might be dissuaded from engaging in protected activity if she knew that her fiancé would...
Read MoreSupreme Court Rules on Arbitration Issues for Unions and Employees in Two Cases
Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court issued two decisions concerning whether particular issues had to be decided by an arbitrator or in federal court. One care arose in the traditional area of labor arbitration between companies and unions; the second arose in the ever-growing area of employer-imposed arbitration agreements on regular employees. In the first, Granite Rock v. International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the Court ruled for the company, as ScotusBlog describes: The parties had reached a collective bargaining agreement (CBA), but they disagreed about both when the CBA was formed and...
Read MoreSupreme Court Rules on 2-Member Labor Board and Workplace Privacy
Two labor and employment decisions were released by the U.S. Supreme Court this past week. In the first, City of Ontario v. Quon, the Court unanimously held (with Scalia concurring separately) that the government employer’s search of employee text messages was reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. Unlike private employers, public employers are constrained (somewhat) by the Fourth Amendment’s restrictions on searches and seizures in the workplace. In this case, the city got a private company to release the full text messages of police officers because of their overuse of the...
Read MoreTwo Employment Decisions from the Supreme Court
On May 24, the Supreme Court issued two employment-related opinions. The first, Lewis v. Chicago, concerned the filing deadline for disparate impact discrimination cases under Title VII. The black firefighter plaintiffs in the case sought to challenge a written test used for determining promotions. The question is whether their statute of limitations began running when the test was scored, or when the test results were actually used to determine promotion decisions. Reversing the Seventh Circuit, the Court unanimously held (Scalia writing) that it was the latter because it was the use...
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