Supreme Court Upholds Anti-Discrimination Laws against Workers
Recent decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court have given employees who say they were punished for complaining of bias on the job greater ability to file lawsuits, according to a Los Angeles Times report.
The court found that workers' claims of retaliation by their employers are covered by civil rights laws even though these old laws do not specifically spell out this type of discrimination. These findings were surprising to civil rights and civil liberties advocates because just last year the Supreme Court made a series of rulings in favor of employers that limited the rights of employees.
You may be wondering how the Supreme Court decisions differ from existing civil rights laws, which already protect workers from retaliation by employers after they complain of bias based on their race, religion, gender, national origin or age. Specifically, the ruling confirmed Section 1981, a Reconstruction-era civil rights law which addresses retaliation for race discrimination and explicitly enforces the idea that individuals have the right to file personal injury lawsuits when they are victims of discrimination. Section 1981 has been used as legal grounds for years, but has never before been tested in the Supreme Court until now.
The details of the case on which the Supreme Court ruled were fairly routine: a former assistant manager of a Cracker Barrel restaurant near Chicago alleged that he was fired after he complained about a white supervisor who made racist comments and about the firing of a black food service worker. The Court's 7-2 ruling supported his right to advance his discrimination lawsuit against the company for retaliating against him.
In a similar decision, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of workers who were retaliated against for complaining of age bias. The case in question was a lawsuit filed by a 45-year-old postal clerk from Puerto Rico; government lawyers had argued that these workers had no right to file a lawsuit because they were protected by the civil service system.
These rulings are a welcome distinction from rulings made last year by the Supreme Court, in which the court threw out a pay-discrimination lawsuit filed by a female manager in Alabama who had been paid less than men doing the same job, due to a technicality. The court's 5-4 decision concluded that the woman failed to cite recent acts of bias as required by the law. Given that decision, the recent rulings come as a pleasant surprise to civil rights advocates.
