In 2013, Lihuan Wang, then a student at Syracuse University and an unpaid intern for Phoenix Sattelite Television, sued Phoenix because her supervisor took her to lunch and to a hotel room where he kissed her by force and grabbed her buttocks. She resisted and, later, Phoenix wouldn’t hire her.…
A United States District Court Judge in the District of Columbia issued a recent opinion that could radically change the discrimination protections afforded to members of the LGBT community, but perhaps not in the way that you would expect. In a complaint filed in the federal district court in D.C.,…
This is the beginning of a series on the implications of today’s National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”) decision that Northwestern’s football players, “are employees of the school and therefore entitled to hold an election to decide whether to unionize,” according to The Chicago Tribune. We’re going to start by focusing…
The Workplace Policy Institute has a comprehensive analysis of possible legislative and regulatory changes to employment law in the coming year. While the full article is certainly worth a read, here is a short summary of some of the most important points. Congress is unlikely to pass any major legislation…
The EEOC has filed 12 religious discrimination lawsuits in fiscal year 2013, more than in the previous year, and indicative of the increasing attention being paid to it in recent months. In general, this may be one of the areas of more frequent activity in employment law in the coming…
For our lead in this week, the Employment Discrimination Report has another look at how sexual harassment in the workplace can be a problem even when it is not committed by supervisors or co-workers. Basically, an employer is under an obligation to remedy a potential harassment situation if made aware…
On October 3, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York found that because a female intern was not an employee, she could not bring a claim for harassment under the New York City Human Rights Law against Phoenix Satellite Television, Inc. This is nothing new, as…
In one of last week’s biggest cases, the New York Court of Appeals unanimously voted that under the NYC Human Rights Law indefinite leave for a disabled employee is not a per se unreasonable accommodation and that the employer instead must prove hardship. This holding, although foreseeable based on the…
This blog has previously covered the EEOC’s attempt to enforce a Title VII disparate impact theory against an employer utilizing a strict criminal background check. The EEOC had commenced suits against BMW and Family Dollar, and here, lost a case against Freedman Companies. The district court in the Freedman case…
With a slow post-Fourth of July news week and the recent end of the Supreme Court term, I first wanted to touch on an international article that shows the U.S. does not have a monopoly on failing to protect employee’s rights. The European Court of Justice recently ruled that Italy…