Employment Discrimination / Sexual Harassment / Civil Rights
Employment Discrimination laws seek to prevent discrimination based on race, sex, religion, national origin, physical disability, and age by employers. Federal, state and local laws prohibit discrimination in hiring, promotion, job assignment, termination, compensation, and various types of harassment.. The United States Constitution and state constitutions provide additional protection where the employer is a governmental body if the government has taken significant steps to help the discriminatory practice of the employer.
IMPORTANT: Employment discrimination cases have very short Statutes of Limitations. (The time limit for filing a case). Usually, such a claim must be filed in 180 days or 300 days after the last act of discrimination. Any separate discriminatory acts which occurred earlier might not be covered.
To learn more about Employment Discrimination, take a look at the following information. Our goal is to answer your basic questions by describing the legal aspects of discrimination.
What is Illegal Discrimination
Questions & Answers about Employment Discrimination
Employment Discrimination and Sexual Harassment - General Legal Principals
Case Summaries: Employment Discrimination and Sexual Harassment
Employment Law Frequently Asked Questions
Recent News - Civil Rights
Hostile Environment
An environment is "hostile" when managers or co-workers are engaging in discriminatory intimidation, ridicule, and insult, which is sufficiently severe or pervasive to change the worker's conditions of employment and create an abusive working relationship. The harassment must be objectively abusive and the worker who files the complaint also must experience it as abusive.
Important: Unless the harassment is based on race, sex, religion, national origin, physical disability, and age it can not generally be the basis of a lawsuit.
Factors that the courts use to determine whether or not the environment is sufficiently hostile to justify bringing a lawsuit include the following kinds of things:
- frequency of the conduct
- severity of the conduct
- Whether the conduct is physical or verbal
- Whether the conduct unreasonably interferes with a worker's performance
- Affect of the conduct on its victims.
Workers who are in a hostile environment based on their race, color, creed, sex, place of national origin, age, or condition of disability, can bring a civil rights complaint.
What Creates a Hostile Environment
Sexual Harassment
Sexual harassment is a type of discrimination. It is any kind of sexual behavior that is unwelcome and/or inappropriate for the work place and is based on sex. Sexual harassment can be verbal harassment (bad comments or dirty jokes), visual harassment (sexual or embarrassing posters, cartoons, drawing, etc.), physical harassment, and sexual favors (sexual advances, confrontation with sexual demands.) In the work place, sexual harassment can come from the owner, supervisor, manager, lead person, foreperson, co-worker and/or customer. It does not need to have sexual content to be based on sex. For example, if a manager yells and screams only at women or uses sex specific names like bitch or slut, that may be sexual harassment. IMPORTANT: Employment discrimination cases have very short statutes of limitations. Usually, such a claim must be filed 180 days, or 300 days after the last act of discrimination. Any separate acts of discrimination which occurred earlier might not be covered.
Roxanne's Rules for Avoiding Sexual Harassment:
- If you would not say it to your mother, do not say it to your co-worker.
- If you would not do it with your daughter in the room, don't do it on the job.
- If you don't want to see it in detail on the front page of the paper, don't do it, don't say it.
Opening Our Eyes to Sexual Harassment
