Earlier this week, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) published its Annual Performance Report for for the year of 2022. Reversing a multi-year trend of decreasing claims, the EEOC reports that discrimination and unlawful harassment claims exploded in 2022. Specifically, the EEOC received 73,485 new discrimination charges, which represents an increase of almost 20% when compared to 2021. The number of filed claims had decreased each year from 2015 through 2021. The increase in claims in 2022 coincides with the return of employees to the workplace (after working from home in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic). It remains to be seen whether 2022 represents a one time "blip" or whether the trend has reversed, and claims will increase over the next several years. In any event, it is important to ensure that your supervisors are well trained to respond to complaints of unlawful harassment and discrimination and to have clear policies instructing employees where to report such claims.
On average, 1.3 million people are victims of nonfatal workplace violence every year in the United States. See Indicators of Workplace Violence, 2019 (ojp.gov). A rising number of states, including our neighbors in Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada, have addressed this problem through legislation that allows an employer to seek a workplace violence protective order. This remedy has not been...
Influencer star Ash Trevino has filed a lawsuit against a woman she says called her probation officer in the hopes that the influencer would get a violation of her supervised release ... before p...