Blog

Two black women who worked in the Fox News payroll department claim Fox New’s longtime comptroller, Judith Slater, subjected them to “top-down racial harassment.”

According to NY Mag, plaintiffs Tichaona Brown, a payroll manager, and Tabrese Wright, a payroll coordinator, allege Slater made racially charged remarks, such as suggesting that black people wanted to cause white people physical harm and that black men were “wife beaters.” According to Times, the lawsuit also claims Slater asked Wright if all of her children were “fathered by the same man,” and that Slater made disparaging remarks about the Black Lives Matter movement and about Wright’s hair and credit score. Slater also allegedly accused black employees of mispronouncing words like “month,” “father,” “mother,” and “ask” — and requested Brown actually say those words in a meeting.

“We are confident that the good men and women of the Bronx will hold Fox accountable for what we believe to be its abhorrent racist conduct, reminiscent of the Jim Crow era,” the plantiffs’ attorneys, Douglas H. Wigdor and Jeanne Christensen of the Wigdor law firm, told the Times in a statement.

If you too have suffered racial discrimination in the workplace, contact us today for a free consultation and learn about the options available to you.

Sandra Black was fired for telling the truth to government investigators. After more than two years, Black has been vindicated and is receiving justice. She won her job back along with lost pay and damages.

As mentioned in the Washington Post, Black is the employee-concerns program manager we wrote about in August when she was introduced at a news conference called by three senators. They complained about the Energy Department’s weak oversight of contractor companies that retaliate against whistleblowers.

“The DOE has the ability to make things right — first by reinstating its rules to punish contractors that retaliate against whistleblowers like Sandra Black, and second, by penalizing this specific contractor for retaliating against her,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said Thursday by email. “The DOE’s failure to take any action would send a dangerous signal to contractors at the Energy Department and across the government that it’s still open season on whistleblowers.”

Ageism begins during the job search. While the current unemployment rate for people 45 and over is comparatively low — about 3.5 percent versus 4.9 percent nationally — older workers are at a disadvantage when looking for new gigs. They take longer to find work and make up about 45 percent of the long-term unemployed, according to Next Avenue.

About two in three workers between age 45 and 74 have experienced it at work, according to AARP. Most people believe ageism starts in their 50s, though research suggests it actually begins around age 35. The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 was supposed to address this unfairness, but in 2015, over 21,000 complaints were filed with the government.

Ageism — both at work and outside the office — isn’t going away anytime soon, but we can help make things better for older employees by just being ourselves.

Standing up for our own qualifications and confronting prejudices against working boomers are just two of the real, actionable measures we must take in addressing larger, more institutional issues.

Are you experiencing age discrimination on the job? Don’t let this happen to you. Fight back! Contact us today for a consultation.

 

A new study reveals, female employees who engage in misconduct at Wells Fargo Advisors are 27% more likely than their male counterparts to have lost their jobs.

Wells Fargo Advisors had the highest rate of female workers leaving among the 44 firms studied between 2005 and 2015, as mentioned in CNN Money. It was followed closely by A.G. Edwards, which is also a division of Wells Fargo. The researchers connected the dots and concluded the employees were often leaving because they were fired.

“The financial industry is willing to give male advisers a second chance, while female advisers are likely to be cast from the industry,” wrote professors Mark Egan of the University of Minnesota, Gregor Matvos from the University of Chicago and Stanford’s Amit Seru.

According to the Huffington Post, under their new policy, which takes effect in October, Starbucks white-collar employees who give birth to a baby are eligible for up to 18 weeks paid time off. That’s three times as much as the six weeks a woman working in a Starbucks store would get if she has a baby.

A new study by VitalSmarts, a Leadership Training Company, looked at the pervasive effects and attitudes of employees facing discrimination in the workplace. It found more than a quarter of those facing discrimination said it was common, unmanageable and impactful.

As mentioned in Benefits Pro, the discrimination the 500 respondents report is based on race, age, gender, national origin, religion, physical or mental disability, medical condition, pregnancy, marital status or sexual orientation.

Forty-nine percent of those facing discrimination say it happens regularly, and 66 percent say it has long-term effects on their motivation and commitment to advance in the company.

 

Arbitration is when a dispute between two parties, such as an employer and employee, submit their differences to ultimately be decided in court. A mandatory arbitration refers to an arbitration agreement that an employer requires new employees to sign as a condition of employment or requires existing employees to sign as a condition to continue their employment.

California’s rules on mandatory arbitration are often referred to as the Armendariz standards, based on the name of the leading court decision. Under these standards, an arbitration agreement must be mutual, not one sided, and not impose any added costs or fees on an employee that would not have applied in litigation.

As mentioned by the Society of Human Resource Management, the California Supreme Court’s new decision states that “a provision in an arbitration agreement isn’t enforceable if it waives the right to seek public injunctive relief in any forum. Public injunctive relief is meant to prohibit activities that “threaten future injury to the general public” and allows a plaintiff to ask the court to prevent a defendant from engaging in allegedly unlawful practice in the future.”

Dr. Phil ex-employee, Leah Rothman claims TV icon, Dr. Phil McGraw locked 300 employees in a room staffed by security guards as he made accusations that one of them had leaked information to the media.

Rothman’s lawsuit against Dr. Phil McGraw, his production company and CBS claims she was forced to quit the show in April 2015 due to a hostile work environment. She had worked on the show since 2003.

“If you f— with me, I’ll f— with you,” McGraw told the staff, according to the lawsuit.

As described by NY Daily News, to make matters worse, Rothman claims McGraw already knew which employee had leaked the information — and that the harrowing meeting was nothing more than a twisted scare tactic.

Rothman, quit her job last April, claiming the emotional stress caused by McGraw’s frightening confrontation became too much to bear.

She is now suing the TV icon for false imprisonment and emotional distress — as well as wrongful constructive termination and whistle blower retaliation.

 

Whistleblower laws protects an employee from being retaliated against after reporting an employer that has violated the law or breached the public trust. Under the California Labor Code Section 1102.5, employers cannot create or enforce any rules preventing employees from whistleblowing. If an employer retaliates against a whistleblower, the employer may be required to reinstate the employee’s employment and work benefits, pay lost wages, and take other steps necessary to comply with the law.

The recent law changes now extends this protection to employees who make internal reports about suspected violations of the federal securities laws and other anti-fraud statutes, even if they never report the suspected violations to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

As stated by the California Department of Industrial Relations (DIR), the law protects an employee who discloses information to “a government or law enforcement agency, person with authority over the employee, or to another employee with authority to investigate, discover, or correct the violation or noncompliance, or who provides information to or testifies before a public body conducting an investigation, hearing or inquiry, where the employee has reasonable cause to believe that the information discloses.”

 

Under the new ordinance, that became effective on March 13, employers with 36 or more employees must offer additional work hours to existing qualified part-time workers before hiring new employees including subcontractors or the use of temporary staffing services. The San Jose Opportunity to Work Ordinance was initiated in November 2016 in the general election ballot, which was approved by 63% of San Jose voters.

The ordinance was created in an effort to promote full-time jobs in the city of San Jose and deter companies from hiring more part-time employees to avoid health insurance and other related costs. The new law will affect about 1,200 nonprofit and for-profit employers, and about 64,00 part-time workers.

As stated by the National Law Review, the ordinance requires employers to maintain the following records for four years:

• Work schedules and employment and payroll records pertaining to current and former Employees;

• Copies of written offers to current and former part-time employees for additional work hours (the Ordinance does not appear to require the offer be written, but this provision suggests employers ought to ensure all offers are, in fact, made in writing); and

• Any other records the Office of Equality Assurance may require that Employers maintain to demonstrate compliance.

A violation of the ordinance is subject to a warning by the San Jose Office of Equality Assurance. Any subsequent violation may expose an employer to substantial civil penalties, and even civil litigation.