Recently, I was asked if anything was going on in employment law besides the pandemic (e.g. vaccine mandates, OSHA rules, healthcare provider rules, employee bodily integrity “rights,” etc.). Of course, the wheels of employment justice continue to turn on fronts unrelated to the pandemic. What follows constitutes a snapshot of some recent nationwide developments of note.
Intersectional Discrimination
The Supreme Court, in the Bostock decision, by a vote of 6 – 3, ruled that federal law prohibits employers from terminating employees because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. The Supreme Court stated that “it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex . . . When an employer fires an employee because she is homosexual or transgender, two causal factors may be in play—both the individual’s sex and something else (the sex to which the individual is attracted or with which the individual identifies).” The ramifications of this decision continue to radiate. Most recently, the 10th Circuit relied on Bostock to reverse summary judgment in a Title VII “sex plus age” case. The 10th Circuit relied on Bostock’s holding that “if changing the employee’s sex would have yielded a different choice by the employer—a statutory violation has occurred.” Thus, “termination is ‘because of sex’ if the employer would not have terminated a male employee with the same ‘plus-’...
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul stressed earlier this year she would be cracking down on auto insurance fraud statewide. Several months later, her office has announced more than a dozen related arrests.