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Jul 11 2011
3 Comments
Discrimination, Employment Law, Feminism, Law

Jamie Leigh Jones Loses Her Rape Case in Court

The news this week brings a reminder that while mandatory arbitration infringes on employees’ rights to a full trial in court, sometimes a full trial in court is no great shakes either. Jamie Leigh Jones, the Halliburton employee who accused seven of her co-workers of brutally raping her, lost her case when a jury ruled that the sex was consensual. One of Jones’s attorneys suggested that the verdict may have been different if the jury had been allowed to hear evidence about “her rapist’s criminal history, including violence against women.” He said that the jury did hear evidence about Jones’s “entire personal history.”

This story may not be over: I expect that Jones’s attorneys will appeal the verdict based on those evidentiary decisions and possibly on other grounds as well.

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Jun 23 2011
Discrimination, Employment Law, Feminism, Law, Supreme Court

The Supreme Court Robbed Workers of an Important Tool for Workplace Reform: Class Actions

Excellent article on how Wal-Mart’s corporate culture fosters discrimination, and how the employees have now been stripped of their two best hopes: unions and class actions.

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Jun 21 2011
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Discrimination, Employment Law, Feminism, Law, Supreme Court

Companies Can’t Discriminate, But Their Managers Can: The Supreme Court Gives Wal-Mart the Win in Dukes Gender Discrimination Class Action Case

Also published in different forms on Salon and in Newsday.

Today the Supreme Court sounded the death knell for Dukes v. Wal-Mart, the class action lawsuit accusing Wal-Mart of paying and promoting women less than similarly- or less-qualified men. To protect corporations from having to do more to prevent gender discrimination than pop a few politically correct paragraphs into the employee handbook, the Supreme Court resorted to a belabored procedural argument that incentivizes corporations to do as little as possible to prevent discrimination. The five-Justice majority did not rule on whether or not Wal-Mart actually discriminates against women – they didn’t let the case get that far. Instead they shut it down by changing the rules of engagement.

One of the plaintiffs’ central arguments was that Wal-Mart has a policy of leaving promotion and pay decisions to the discretion of individual managers, and that these managers have made discriminatory decisions. If the women suing Wal-Mart had prevailed, every American employer would have been on notice that it is not enough to sit on their corporate hands and allow gender discrimination to take its natural course in this way. Instead they would have had to make it their business to ensure that their managers treated women fairly. But the Court didn’t want that, as the majority feels that “allowing discretion by local supervisors” is “a very common and presumptively reasonable way of doing business.” (In his opinion for the majority Justice Scalia also announces, without citing any evidence, that most managers work carefully to avoid discrimination in their pay and promotion decisions when left to their own devices. That makes it all the more puzzling why the higher one gets in the corporate hierarchy in the U.S., the fewer women there are.)

So the Supreme Court looked to procedure. To bring a case as a class action in federal court, the plaintiffs have to get permission from the judge to proceed as a class. This makes sense: you wouldn’t want someone to be able to file a lawsuit on your behalf without an objective outsider considering whether the lawsuit was in your interest and whether the person filing it would represent you well. To protect you from becoming part of a class action that doesn’t benefit you, plaintiffs have to persuade a judge that they satisfy the requirements of what is known as Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23 before their lawsuit can proceed as a class action.

One of Rule 23’s prerequisites is that “[o]ne or more members of a class may sue…as representative parties on behalf of all members only if there are questions of law or fact common to the class.” The Wal-Mart plaintiffs clearly alleged common questions of law or fact, including statistical evidence that Wal-Mart pays and promotes men more than women; Wal-Mart’s policy of leaving decisions regarding promotion and (within certain ranges) pay up to individual managers; evidence that Wal-Mart has a uniform corporate culture across its stores; and evidence that Wal-Mart’s culture fosters discrimination against women. These are precisely the kind of “common questions of law or fact” that courts routinely accept as satisfying the Rule 23 “commonality” prerequisite.

The Court used this previously clear “common questions of law or fact” requirement to thwart the Wal-Mart women by redefining the requirement beyond recognition. According to Justice Scalia, “common questions of law or fact” now means that plaintiffs must “demonstrate that the class members have suffered the same injury.” In no universe that I have visited do these two phrases require the same thing.

It’s not clear just how far the Court will take this bizarre new rule. Does “same injury” mean that the plaintiffs must show that every single class member was denied the exact same promotion? Or that each one was underpaid by the same amount? Scalia writes that it does mean that suffering “a violation of the same provision of law” won’t suffice as suffering the “same injury.” This is a remarkable and counterintuitive holding: after this ruling, a group cannot sue their joint employer for violating the same legal right for each one of them. Instead they have to prove that the legal violation harmed them in the same way. This is completely backwards: courts exist to redress violations of the law, regardless of whether those violations cause their victims to suffer in the same or different ways. It is thanks to this procedural backflip that Wal-Mart and other employers can now delegate their way out of being responsible for discrimination in their workplaces.

Arguably before Monday’s Dukes v. Wal-Mart decision, American employers were subject to legal liability if they delegated so much discretion to individual managers that those managers created a pattern of discriminating against women – at least, the four Justices in the minority believe that this was the law. Now employers have every incentive to take their hands off the reins and let managers make pay and promotion decisions based on whatever criteria they choose. This is a major loss for women, minorities, senior citizens, the disabled, and any other group that tends to get the short end of the stick in the workplace. The procedural manipulations required to reach this point have caused a major loss for any group of people that seeks to redress a legal violation through a class action: now each individual will have to pay for legal representation alone and probably forego evidence of violations against similarly situated people. Goliath has won, and it is every David for himself.

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Jun 02 2011
2 Comments
Employment Law, Law, Supreme Court

Your Job or Your Rights: How Employers Force Workers Into Arbitration

Article first published as Your Job or Your Rights: How Employers Force Workers Into Arbitration on Blogcritics. Blogcritics named this article an Editors’ Pick. Also published in The #employmentlaw Daily and New York Employment Law buzz.

Seven of Jamie Leigh Jones’s male co-workers welcomed her to her new job in Iraq by drugging and gang-raping her, according to the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. She says that the rapists were so violent that afterwards she had to undergo reconstructive surgery on her breasts.

Ms. Jones sought her day in court, but her employer, Halliburton, tried to bar the courthouse doors. When she took the job Halliburton made her sign an arbitration agreement which forces employees to give up their rights to take employment-related disputes to a jury. Instead, they pledge to resolve disputes through secret, binding arbitration.

This spring the Supreme Court issued an opinion in another forced arbitration case, AT&T vs. Concepcion, which involved cell phone users whose service contract required them to take disputes to arbitration and not to court. It also prohibited them from bringing a class action in arbitration, leaving them no way to bring a class action at all. The Supreme Court announced that that is just fine. It is legal for a company to unilaterally ban customers from court and eliminate the possibility of a class action.

Many employers force similar arbitration provisions on their employees. In fact, there is a decent chance that you gave away your right to a jury without realizing it when you accepted your current job. Like mobile phone and credit card companies, employers hide this tidbit in jargon and small print. If you want the job, you trade your right to a jury, and in its place you get private, paid arbitrators whose decisions are essentially unappealable and who don’t have to follow the law. They don’t even have to explain the reasoning behind their decisions.

Not every employer pulls this trick, but many of the big ones do, including Anheuser-Busch, Cisco Systems, Dillard’s Department Stores, Halliburton, Hooter’s, and most major employers in the financial services industry. Approximately 48 million American workers may be bound by arbitration agreements, according to the National Employment Lawyers Association.

Employers favor arbitration because it can be faster and cheaper than court. But time-consuming judicial procedures are meant to make the process fair to both parties. Their absence from arbitration weights the balance in favor of employers: for instance, in court, employers have to turn over damaging documents and produce supervisors and co-workers for depositions; in arbitration, employers can usually keep all that information to themselves. Employers also like that arbitrators have a financial incentive to favor them: employers hire the same private arbitration companies over and over, whereas each employee tends to be a one-time player.

In Ms. Jones’s rape case, federal courts ruled that several of her claims (vicarious liability for assault and battery; intentional infliction of emotional distress; negligent hiring, retention, and supervision of the employees involved in the assault; and false imprisonment – this last arising out of Halliburton’s allegedly locking Ms. Jones in a container after the alleged gang-rape and refusing her even a phone call) were not covered by the forced arbitration clause in her employment agreement because they were not related to her employment. Therefore those claims could be heard in court rather than arbitration – but only after the arbitration of her other claims ended. This ruling validates the statements of many federal courts (though not this Supreme Court) that forced arbitration is unfair, and that it is particularly unfair in the context of employment discrimination claims.

Halliburton fought hard to convince the courts that all of Ms. Jones’ claims based on her alleged assault should be heard in private arbitration and not in open court because it knew it would be better off if it could keep Ms. Jones’s brutal allegations muffled in an inherently biased arbitration instead of public in an open, unbiased court. Despite its efforts, this June Ms. Jones’s remaining claims will go to trial.

The Supreme Court has signaled that it will not stop companies from forcing arbitration on individuals, and in the AT&T case it ruled that states may not do so either. Yet 59% of Americans oppose forced arbitration according to a study by Lake Research Partners. If employees (or consumers) are going to be protected from take-it-or-leave-it forced arbitration agreements, it will have to be by an act of Congress.

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Aug 13 2010
Discrimination, Employment Law, Feminism, Law

Turning the Other Cheek: Illegal Retaliation in the Workplace

Turning the Other Cheek: Illegal Retaliation in the Workplace

If someone went to your employer and said you were discriminating against them, wouldn’t you hold a grudge? Wouldn’t you want to get them fired, and if you couldn’t do that, at least make their lives more difficult? Of course you would (and if you honestly wouldn’t even want to, see your parish priest about nomination for sainthood and/or enjoy nirvana). That is why there is more retaliation going on in American workplaces than there is discrimination (and there is plenty of that going on too).

It is illegal under federal law (Title VII § 704) to retaliate against an employee for complaining about workplace discrimination. That applies to everyone from the employee’s supervisor all the way up the food chain to the CEO. But people being what they are, they retaliate anyway. There are many time-honored forms of illegal retaliation, among them firing, demoting, transferring, changing work schedules, cutting bonuses, assigning lame accounts or thorny clients, and general day-to-day hassling.

In the past what was and wasn’t illegal retaliation was unclear, partly because the federal appellate courts disagreed with each other about the definition, and partly because different federal courts within each circuit (i.e. group of states) agreed with each other about how to word the rule against retaliation but disagreed about what it meant. Time was that in many circuits you could get away with retaliation if you did it outside the workplace. That left the door open for prank calls, letting air out of tires, toilet papering, and any other non-work-related harassment that was short of a misdemeanor.

In some circuits, you could transfer an employee to a distant office or put the employee on the graveyard shift, as long as what you did was not a “materially adverse change in the terms and conditions” of employment. In yet other circuits the line you couldn’t cross was the “ultimate employment decision,” meaning you couldn’t fire, cut pay, demote, or take other actions of similar severity, but anything less was okay. Then there were the circuits that said illegal retaliation encompassed anything that was likely to dissuade “a reasonable worker” from complaining about discrimination. Those circuits won when the Supreme Court resolved the whole mess a few years ago in a case called Burlington Northern v. White, which closed the door to retaliation outside the workplace.

In Burlington the employee, Sheila White, filed suit against her employer, Burlington Northern, for discrimination and retaliation. The retaliation she alleged consisted of changing her job responsibilities and suspending her for 37 days without pay, though the company later paid her for those 37 days. The Supreme Court decided that even though the change in her job responsibilities was not a demotion, and even though she ultimately received all of her pay, she had still suffered illegal retaliation. The change in job responsibilities was a change from the relatively clean job of operating a forklift to the much dirtier and more arduous tasks of cleaning up railroad rights of way and carrying heavy loads back and forth. And the 37 days she didn’t receive any pay included Christmas; there was no money for gifts in the White household that year. The Supreme Court said that a reasonable employee could easily look at what Burlington Northern did to White and decide that reporting discrimination to this employer just wasn’t worth it.

So, problem solved – everyone across the country now knows that even actions unrelated to the workplace can constitute retaliation. If only.

The problem with our courts is not judicial activism, but the opposite. I don’t know if it is a question of effort, ability, or just not giving a damn, but somehow courts managed to mess up the Supreme Court’s clear ruling when they tried to apply it in their own cases. One example is Hicks v. Baines, a case in the Second Circuit (which encompasses Connecticut, New York, and Vermont).

The issue that tripped up the Hicks court had to do with what is called the prima facie case, which just means that there is a certain minimum amount of evidence or argument that a plaintiff has to provide just to stay in court. Satisfying that minimum often doesn’t take much, but a plaintiff has to know what exactly to show in order to keep a case alive.

In Burlington Northern the Supreme Court made it crystal clear that you couldn’t sidestep the rule against retaliating by doing your retaliation outside of the workplace. Even if your retaliatory acts had nothing to do with the victim’s employment, they were still illegal as long as they would dissuade a reasonable employee from complaining about discrimination. So what does the Second Circuit in Hicks say that plaintiffs have to show to satisfy the minimal prima facie test and stay in court? An “adverse employment action.”

That’s right. According to the Second Circuit, just to keep the case alive, just to satisfy the bare minimum standard, the plaintiff has to show that the retaliation involved the employer doing something nasty that was work-related. The really jaw-dropping part is that the court laid this out in its written opinion just after a long discussion about Burlington Northern and how the Supreme Court had decided that anti-retaliation protection “extends beyond workplace-related or employment-related retaliatory acts and harm.”

Fortunately for the plaintiffs in Hicks, the retaliatory actions that they alleged were all employment-related, so the Second Circuit’s bizarre mistake did not affect the outcome of their case (for the record, they won part of it and lost part of it).

The important takeaway from Burlington: any retaliation for complaining about workplace discrimination is illegal, whether it is work-related or not, as long as it would dissuade a reasonable employee from complaining about discrimination. The important takeaway from Hicks: it’s not just judges’ political inclinations that you have to watch out for. Consider too their propensity for following the rules, and for expressing themselves clearly enough that they don’t appear to be flouting rules that. they are trying to apply.

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