A spike in employers retaliating against employees for asserting workplace rights is leading the U.S. Labor Department to use more aggressive enforcement and litigation tools, the DOL’s top attorney said Wednesday.
“What we’ve all been seeing across our agencies is increasingly alarming behavior by employers that has caused us to want to act in unison and really send a strong message that this behavior will not be tolerated,” DOL Solicitor Seema Nanda said at an online event for employers co-hosted by the National Labor Relations Board and the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Nanda said she’s deployed her office of more than 500 attorneys nationwide to get more actively involved and at earlier stages in cases, including by increasing their filing of motions seeking temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions from courts to block businesses from continuing to chill workers from participating in DOL investigations.
She spoke alongside political leaders at the EEOC and NLRB to kick off a tri-agency initiative focused on combating employer reprisals when workers file complaints, cooperate with investigators, or engage in collective activity.
The agencies have long made anti-retaliation a core part of their missions under their respective workplace statutes, but agency officials said the increase in certain troubling types of employer actions has triggered their...
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