The EEOC’s New Gameplan

September 8, 2012 by 2 Comments

The situation in the United States is bleak, to say the least, for workers who are targets of employment discrimination and harassment.

 Federal courts are blatantly hostile to these types of cases –  dismissing most of them before they ever reach a jury – and our leaders in Washington, D.C., seem to be oblivious.

Part of the problem is that the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency that is supposed to be combating employment discrimination, is overwhelmed and underfunded.

 The EEOC says there has been  a 38 percent rise in the number of charges filed with the EEOC  against private employers and state and local government employers in the past 20 years.  But  the  EEOC’s staffing levels and funding dropped nearly 30 percent between 2000 and 2008. An infusion of resources in 2009 allowed for some rebuilding of capacity, but that was quickly stalled when funding was reduced and hiring freezes were implemented in FY 2011 and 2012.

The bottom line is that  many observers feel the EEOC has been about  as effective as a gnat battling an elephant in recent years.

 But  it seems that change is afoot. The EEOC is seeking public comment  (see below) on a proposed new strategic plan that it hopes will be more effective than the EEOC’s prior practice of  filing individual lawsuits against select employers. 

In its new plan, the EEOC says it will strategically attack  practices and issues that adversely affect large numbers of employees. The EEOC identifies five national priorities:

1.  Eliminate Systemic Barriers in Recruitment and Hiring. The EEOC will target class-based  hiring discrimination and facially neutral hiring practices that adversely impact particular groups. This includes, for example, steering of individuals into specific jobs due to their status in a particular group, restrictive application processes, and the use of screening tools (e.g., pre-employment tests, background screens, date of birth screens in online applications) that adversely impact groups protected under the law.

2. Protect immigrant, migrant and other vulnerable workers. The EEOC will target disparate pay, job segregation, harassment, trafficking and discriminatory language policies affecting these vulnerable workers who may be unaware of their rights under the equal employment laws, or reluctant or unable to exercise them.

3. Address Emerging Issues. The agency will address emerging issues with respect to:

-The Americans with Disability Act, particularly coverage issues, and the proper application of ADA defenses, such as undue hardship, direct threat, and business necessity;

-Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals coverage under Title VII sex discrimination provisions.

-Accommodating pregnancy when women have been forced onto unpaid leave after being denied accommodations routinely provided to similarly situated employees.

4. Preserve Access to the Legal System. The EEOC will target policies and practices intended to prevent  individuals from exercising their rights under employment discrimination statutes, or which impede the EEOC’s investigative or enforcement effort, including retaliatory actions; overly broad waivers; and settlement provisions that prohibit filing charges with EEOC.

5. Combat Harassment. The EEOC will launch a national education and outreach campaign – aimed at both employees and employers – to prevent and appropriately respond to harassment in the workplace.

 Okay, some of this sounds like politically-correct gobbledygook that is incapable of measurement. At the same time, it is encouraging that the EEOC is rethinking its past practices. The  38 percent increase in charges filed with the EEOC  also represents an increase  the suffering of American workers and their families who are subjected to illegal discrimination by employers.  American workers need all the help they can get!

Comments and suggestions must be submitted to the EEOC about the plan by 5 p.m. ET on September 18, 2012 at [email protected] or received by mail at Executive Officer, Office of the Executive Secretariat, U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 131 M Street, NE, Washington, D.C. 20507. The Commission plans to vote on the draft plan at the end of this fiscal year.

Filed Under: AGE DISCRIMINATION, DISPATCHES, EEOC, TITLE VII Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Older Workers Vulnerable to Age Discrimination

April 2, 2012 by 1 Comment

daggerThe U.S. Supreme Court stuck a dagger in the heart of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act a few years ago in its decision, Gross v. FBL Financial Services, Inc., 129 S. Ct. 2343 (2009).

Prior to Gross, the same standard of proof applied equally to all workers who faced illegal discrimination on the job. The Court in Gross established a far higher standard of proof for plaintiffs in age discrimination cases than exists for plaintiffs in cases alleging discrimination based on race, sex, national origin and religion.  This has left older workers more vulnerable to age discrimination.

A bi-partisan bill was introduced in the U.S. Senate in March to rectify this wrong. Under the Protecting Older Workers Against Discrimination Act , if a victim can show that age discrimination was a “motivating factor” behind a decision, the burden shifts to the employer to show it complied with the law. The bill is co-sponsored by Iowa Senators Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT).

After Gross, older workers who filed age discrimination cases were required to prove that age discrimination was the “but for” cause of their termination (i.e., “but for” age discrimination, they would not have been demoted or fired.)

Alternatively, employers could point to any other “legitimate non-discriminatory” reason for firing the Plaintiff to avoid liability.  (“Sure we thought the old fogey was an over-paid dinosaur but he failed to follow company procedure when he called in sick one day so he’s gotta go!”)

Under the proposed bill, it wouldn’t matter if the employer had more than one motivating factor – if one of those motivating factors was age discrimination, the employer could be held liable.

The  Court reasoned backwards in Gross.  The Court said that Congress amended Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to permit mixed-motive claims in discrimination claims involving race, color, religion, sex and national origin. So the fact that Congress failed to amend the ADEA to permit mixed-motive claims meant that Congress intended to disallow mixed -motive claims.  The Court threw out decades of precedent that treated age discrimination like every other invidious form of discrimination and left countless older workers without real protection against age discrimination.

The Gross decision has also had reverberations in a wide range of civil cases in addition to age discrimination, including discrimination based on disability.

Harkin is Chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee while Leahy and Grassley are the Chairman and ranking member respectively of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Filed Under: AGE DISCRIMINATION, DISPATCHES, TITLE VII, U.S. SUPREME COURT Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

DECK STACKED IN FEDERAL COURTS?

March 14, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Note: The media office of the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts has failed to respond to a request for comment about this blog entry. PGB

Workers who bring employment discrimination cases in federal court are not just paranoid. Apparently, the deck really is stacked against them!

(Isn’t this discrimination in itself?)

The New York Law School Law Review and The Employee Rights Advocacy Institute For Law & Policy co-sponsored a symposium April 23, 2012 to examine the high failure rates of plaintiffs in employment discrimination cases in federal courts.

Specifically, they discussed why employment discrimination cases are more likely to be summarily dismissed by federal judges through rulings on pre- and post-trial motions.  One factor is believed to be  U.S. Supreme Court decisions (Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly and Ashcroft v. Iqbal) that raised the quantum of facts that a plaintiff must plead to avoid a motion to dismiss.

“A substantial and growing body of evidence, both empirical and anecdotal, shows that civil rights cases, and in particular those alleging employment discrimination, are disproportionately susceptible to dismissal before trial as well as to unfavorable  (judgment notwithstanding verdict)  motions after trial,” said the symposium planners.

Approximately 150 attended the symposium, including  retired Judge Nancy Gertner from the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. She said the message sent by Twombly and Iqbal is that courts should be more concerned with protecting employers from being falsely accused of discrimination than they should be with allowing discrimination to go unpunished, and that as a result, the courts effectively have repealed the protections of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination.  A report of the symposium is availble from the Employee Rights Advocacy Institute for Law and Policy.

A study by the Federal Judicial Center of summary judgment cases filed in seventy-eight federal district courts in 2006 found that federal judges granted requests by the employer for dismissal on a motion for summary judgment 73 percent of the time. This compares to a rate of dismissal of:

  • 53 percent in contract cases,
  • 54 percent in tort or personal injury cases
  • 70 percent in civil rights cases generally
  • 64 percent in prisoner cases
  • 53 percent in “other” cases, including antitrust (53%) and patent (47%) and trademark (50%).

See Joe Cecil & George Cort, Federal Judicial Center, Estimates of Summary Judgment Activity in Fiscal Year 2006 (2007).

Some district courts granted summary judgment motions in employment discrimination cases more than others. In the Ninth Circuit, which is based in San Francisco, CA, some courts granted summary judgment in employment discrimination cases 93% of the time. In the Eleventh Circuit, which is based in Atlanta, GA, some courts granted summary judgment in employment discrimination case 95 % of the time.

This is a trend that has been getting WORSE for years, according to Cornell Law School Professors Kevin M. Clermont and Stewart J. Schwab, authors of Employment Discrimination Plaintiffs in Federal Court: From Bad to Worse? 3 Harv. L. & Pol’y Rev. 103 (2009).

They write that the plaintiff win rate for employment discrimination cases in federal court from 1979-2006 was 15 percent, which was much lower than that for non-jobs cases (51%), possibly because of hurdles placed in jobs cases that do not exist in non-jobs cases.

Furthermore, the authors state that there was a startling 37 percent drop in the number of employment discrimination cases in federal district courts between 1999 and 2007.  They say the decline may be  because “federal courts disfavor employment discrimination plaintiffs, who are now forswearing use of those courts.”  In other words, fear of bias by federal judges may be discouraging  potential plaintiffs from even filing employment cases in federal court!

Plaintiffs who appeal their losses or face an appeal of their victory “again fare remarkably poorly in the circuit courts,” the authors write.  Defendant/employers in the federal courts of appeals have managed over the years to reverse forty-one percent of their trial losses in employment discrimination cases, while plaintiff/employees manage only a nine percent reversal rate.

Generally, it appears that employers do far better in federal courts these days than ever before. A 2010 study found  the U.S. Supreme Court under the leadership of Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., has ruled for business interests 61 percent of the time, compared with 46 percent in the last five years of the court led by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who died in 2005, and  42 percent by all courts since 1953.

Some other sobering but well-documented observations from the Clermont/Schwab article:

  • Plaintiffs in employment discrimination cases are much more likely to have to go to trial, possibly because employers perceive the anti-plaintiff bias works in their favor and refuse to settle.
  •  “ … [E]mployment discrimination cases constitute one of the least successful categories at the district court level, in that plaintiffs win a very small percentage of their actions and fare worse than in almost any other category of civil case.”
  • “Defendants, in sharp contrast to plaintiffs, emerge from appellate court in a much better position than they were in when they left trial court. … we have unearthed an anti-plaintiff effect that is troublesome.”
  • “The bulk of employment discrimination cases turn on intent … The subtle question of the defendant’s intent is likely to be the key issue in a nonfrivolous employment discrimination case that reaches trial, putting the credibility of witnesses into play.  When the plaintiff has convinced the fact finder of the defendant’s wrongful intent, that finding should be largely immune from appellate reversal … Reversal of plaintiffs’ trial victories in employment discrimination cases should be unusually uncommon. Yet we find the opposite.”

It is unlikely that employment law cases are weaker than other types of cases. The authors note that many studies show that people are not anxious to sue except in egregious situations and that contingent-fee attorneys, as well as those looking to fee-shifting, are reluctant to bring questionable claims. They say the impact of other factors on the decline of employment discrimination cases in federal court —  such as alternative dispute resolution — is not known but is unlikely to have caused the precipitous drop.

The authors say the employment discrimination category has dropped in absolute number of terminations every year after 1998, when the total was 23,722.  They say the drop has gone virtually unnoticed and unexplained.

It is understandable that courts want  to place procedural limitations on  cases to avoid overcrowded dockets and to  safeguard judicial resources. However, it is obviously unfair (or worse) for judges to single out employees who allege discrimination for disparate treatment. Like any other plaintiffs, these plaintiffs have  no where else to go but the courts for justice and they have every right to expect a fair and impartial hearing.

In fact, Americans are guaranteed a right to a trial by jury in federal court cases under the Seventh Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.  Specifically, the Seventh Amendment states:

In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Filed Under: AGE DISCRIMINATION, DISPATCHES, FEDERAL, TITLE VII, U.S. SUPREME COURT Tagged With: abusive employers, Administrative Office of U.S. Courts, , Ashcroft v. Iqbal, , bias in federal court, , Cornell Law School, , Employmen, , Employment Rights Advocacy Institute for Law & Policy, Federal Court of Appeals, , federal judge bias, federal judges biased, Harvard Law and Policy Review, Kevin M. Clermont, New York Law School Law Review, , Stewart J. Schwab,

Target can have job, not $4.4 million

December 16, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Here’s yet another case where a jury “got it” but the court did not.  Not only did the appeals court minimize the trauma of workplace abuse in its ruling but it did not hold the employer accountable for failing to halt workplace abuse. PGB

Court Overturns Jury Award

James McKelvey was an Army soldier in 2004 when he lost his right hand trying to defuse a roadside bomb in Iraq.

After recovering at a base in Germany and at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, McKelvey moved back to Michigan, and in February 2006 accepted a civilian job with the army as an operations specialist first at Selfridge Air National Guard Base and eventually at the Detroit Arsenal.

There he became a target of verbal abuse regarding his injury by his supervisor and co-workers, and his supervisor either failed to give him work to do or gave him demeaning work assignments.

McKelvey quit on February 16, 2007 to take a non-military job in the local sheriff’s department, saying he had only stayed that long at the armory because he had a wife and child to support. He then filed a lawsuit alleging he was essentially fired – or constructively discharged – because of a hostile work environment stemming from discrimination because of his disability.

A Michigan federal court jury ruled for McKelvey on both claims but it awarded no damages on the hostile-work-environment claim.  Instead, the jury awarded McKelvey $4,388,302 in front pay on the constructive-discharge claim. Front pay is money awarded for lost compensation during the period between judgment and reinstatement, or if reinstatement is not feasible, instead of reinstatement.

The trial court judge immediately vacated the jury’s award, finding that it was not supported by law.

This week, an appellate court found that McKelvey was constructively discharged from his job at the armory but agreed with the trial court that the proper remedy is reinstatement and not the $4.4 million jury award. (See McKelvey v. Secretary of United States Army, No. 10-1172 (Dec. 14, 2011).

The appeals court said “reasonable minds” could find that McKelvey was constructively discharged from his job at the armory because “ … the crux of this claim turns on the harassment McKelvey endured. McKelvey presented evidence that (a supervisor and coworker) repeatedly called him, among other derogatory things, “all fucked up,” “a piece of shit,” “worthless,” and “a fucking cripple.” … Repeated over the course of nine months, this constant stream of invective could sustain a finding of constructive discharge.”

And yet, the appeals court said, the proper remedy in McKelvey’s case is reinstatement. The court said the $4.4 million award of front pay was too “speculative” for a relatively young man of 38 years old and any trauma McKelvey might experience by returning to the job would be mitigated by the fact that he would have different supervisors and four of his six co-workers would be new, with no connection to the prior harassment.

The  Army had argued that McKelvey could not claim constructive discharge because conditions had improved two months before he quit. According to the appeals court,“This gap is too short for us to say as a matter of law that McKelvey’s workplace was no longer intolerable, and is shorter than the gaps in cases where an employee’s delay in leaving precluded a finding of constructive discharge.”  However, the court said it might agree that McKelvey had waited to long to quit if he had stayed much longer.

The appeals court said McKelvey is entitled to back pay from the time he was constructively discharged until the Army offered him reinstatement  following the trial in his case.

Filed Under: DISPATCHES Tagged With: , , C, , Detroit Armory, , , James McKelvey, Selfridge Air National Guard Base, U.S. Army, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit