Daily headlines trumpet multimillion-dollar awards for employers' violations of a variety of state and federal employment laws. Cases like these get lots of media attention—and they should. But equally deserving of attention are cases where employers won. Analyzing what an employer did right in a situation can have as much—and sometimes more—educational value as the losses.
Retaliation
The latest statistics from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) prove what most HR professionals already knew: Retaliation claims are employers' greatest workplace litigation risk. According to the EEOC, more than 56 percent of all charges filed allege retaliation. These claims are generally preferred by plaintiffs' counsel as the standard of proof is easier to meet than for harassment and discrimination claims, and they appeal to juries.
But that doesn't mean these cases can't be won, with proper documentation. That's the lesson from a Nov. 15 ruling issued by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Johnson v. Iberia Medical Center Foundation.
In this case, a Black woman employed as a charge nurse alleged that the hospital where she worked retaliated against her by terminating her employment shortly after she complained that she was passed over for a promotion because of her race. The 5th Circuit dismissed her case, finding that the hospital's documentation proved that she was fired because numerous complaints had been brought against the nurse for her "performance and...
QUEENSLAND— A nurse in Australia has been formally reprimanded after admitting he submitted forged documents to Qantas (QF) in an attempt to secure a refund for a non-refundable airline ticket. Th...