Articles Posted in Employment Law

A worker who was fired shortly after he was injured on the job and filed for workers’ compensation won a victory recently when the California Court of Appeal reversed a trial court’s decision to award summary judgment to his employer. The court decided that, based upon the type of claim the employee made, the trial court should have analyzed the timeliness of his lawsuit using a two-year time period, not a one-year period.

The origin of the dispute between Adam Prue and his employer, Brady Company/San Diego, Inc., started with a workplace injury Prue suffered in June 2011. Based upon this injury, Prue made it known that he intended to file a workers’ compensation claim. Brady terminated Prue the next month. Prue sued his employer, alleging wrongful termination. The employee claimed that his employer terminated him because he suffered a disabling injury at work. Terminating him as Brady did violated the state’s public policy against discriminating against workers with disabilities, as demonstrated by the Fair Employment and Housing Act, Prue argued in his lawsuit.

Continue reading ›

An employee fired after taking several absences resulting from domestic violence was unable to maintain her discrimination lawsuit against her former employer. The California Court of Appeal upheld a judgment for the employer, concluding that the employee lacked necessary evidence to establish that the employer’s true reason for terminating her was her absences caused by her abusive boyfriend, as opposed to its stated reasons of theft of employer property.

The employee, Sara Rosales, worked at the Riverside location of Moneytree, Inc., a short-term lender, starting in 2008. A year later, Rosales began having problems because her dating relationship had turned violent. By the spring of 2010, the employee began missing work due to the facial injuries inflicted on her by her abusive boyfriend. Rosales incurred more absences as a result of court attendance regarding the domestic violence and also due to additional incidents of violence that left her face injured. Each time, though, the employer recorded Rosales as absent due to domestic violence, and she suffered no negative impact professionally.

Continue reading ›

One of the potentially tricky issues an employer can face involves dealing with an employee who is an alcoholic, or otherwise uses drugs or alcohol. Under the Fair Employment and Housing Act, alcoholism is a recognized disability, so taking an adverse employment action based solely on the employee’s alcoholism is problematic. In some cases, an employer may, however, discipline or terminate an employee for drug- or alcohol-related misconduct, even if the employee’s alcoholism disability is the underlying cause. The nuances of this area of the law are on center stage in the case of former University of Southern California Trojans football coach Steve Sarkisian, who is suing the school for disability discrimination.

The law regarding alcoholism and disability discrimination under the FEHA is fairly clear in some regards. Alcoholism may, in some situations, qualify as a disability under the statute. If it does, the employer has a legal obligation to engage in an interactive process to find a reasonable accommodation of the employee’s disability. The law does not, though, require an employer to accommodate an employee to the point of continuing to employ an employee who cannot perform the essential functions of his job. The law also does not demand that employers allow their employees to be drunk on the job or engage in excessive consumption at work.

Continue reading ›

A former employee at a financial firm was entitled to damages and attorneys’ fees for pregnancy discrimination, according to a Los Angeles County trial court. The California Court of Appeal recently upheld that decision in the woman’s Fair Employment and Housing Act case, since the employer failed to prove that it would have fired the employee in the same timeframe if it had not known about her pregnancy.

The employee in the case, Fatanah LaFleur, had worked at Woodbridge Structured Funding, LLC for only a few months when she became pregnant. Shortly thereafter, Woodbridge terminated the woman. LaFleur sued under the FEHA, claiming that Woodbridge fired her due to her pregnancy and that she was the second woman to suffer such treatment within a month. LaFleur’s supervisor claimed that he did not know about the pregnancy and fired the woman for gossiping and disrupting the office’s staff.

Continue reading ›

A gas company dispatcher, who sent her former supervisor hundreds of text messages, phone calls and emails, even after receiving explicit instructions to stop from the former supervisor and her current supervisor, was not able to support a claim of retaliation in violation of the Fair Employment and Housing Act after her employer required her to undergo a psychological evaluation. Since the employer’s decision was a legitimate and reasonable response to the employee’s behavior, the California Court of Appeal (downloadable word doc) determined that it could not constitute retaliation in violation of the law.

The employee in this case, Maria Valdivia, worked for Southern California Gas Co., where she was promoted to a dispatch specialist position in October 2009. Three months later, Michael Connors became Valdivia’s supervisor. By May 2010, Valdivia had begun emailing Connors hundreds of times. She also called him, texted him, and drove by his home uninvited. By June, Gregory Gellnick became Valdivia’s supervisor. The voluminous emails, texts, and calls to Connors continued even after he ceased being Valdivia’s supervisor, though. Gellnick had a meeting with Valdivia in February 2011 to tell her to cease contacting Connors.

Continue reading ›

A teacher who was the victim of an ongoing pattern of harassment at the hands of students at the school where she taught received a mixed result in her legal action against the school and the Catholic archdiocese that ran it. The US District Court for the Northern District of California allowed the teacher to pursue her federal Title VII claim, but it sided with the archdiocese on the Fair Employment and Housing Act claim, concluding that the state statute’s exemption for religious associations applied.

The case involved the victimization of Kimberly Bohnert, a science teacher at Junipero Serra High School in San Mateo. The problems started with “offensive and sexually graphic” graffiti in a bathroom that depicted Bohnert. Other incidents included sexually inappropriate comments by students on social media involving the teacher and eventually the discovery of cell phone photos and videos that focused up Bohnert’s skirt and were taken without her knowledge or consent.

Believing the school did far too little to end the inappropriate and harassing conduct, the teacher sued the school and the Archdiocese of San Francisco. The teacher alleged that the harassment violated both Title VII and the FEHA. The court allowed the teacher’s Title VII claim to go forward, ruling that the students engaged in an ongoing pattern of activity that was both objectively and subjectively hostile, and that the school authorities did not do enough to prevent the activity from occurring and, once it happened, did not do enough to stop it.

Continue reading ›

A spa employee managed to persuade a jury both that she was on the receiving end of sexual harassment while performing her job and that her employer failed to take the necessary steps required to prevent harassment or discrimination from occurring. However, in spite of all this, the employee ultimately recovered nothing. How could this happen? The jury decided that the harassment the employee suffered was not so pervasive or severe to amount to a violation of the Fair Employment and Housing Act, and the California Court of Appeal decided that employers have no obligation under the law to ensure that their workplaces are free from acts of harassment or discrimination that do not, in and of themselves, violate the statute.

The employee, Domaniqueca Dickson, worked as a massage therapist at a spa owned by Burke Williams, Inc. At some point during Dickson’s time at the spa, two different customers allegedly harassed the therapist. The employee later sued her employer for violating the FEHA. The employer, she argued, by allowing the harassment to occur, was guilty of sexual discrimination, sexual harassment, and failure to take reasonable steps necessary to prevent harassment and discrimination based on sex.

Continue reading ›

In July of this year, Governor Jerry Brown signed AB 987 into law. That legislation provided an important benefit to employees seeking religious or disability-related accommodations in the workplace. Under the new law, the act of requesting a disability or religious accommodation is now a protected activity under the Fair Employment and Housing Act. The law reversed a 2013 court decision that expressly concluded that employees could not take action against employers who punished them for seeking accommodations.

The new law came about following the California Court of Appeal’s decision in the case of Rope v. Auto-Chlor System of Washington, Inc. Scott Rope, a branch manager for Auto-Chlor, requested 30 days of paid leave in order to recuperate from kidney donation surgery. He made the request after learning about the Michelle Maykin Memorial Donation Protection Act. Two days before the DPA became effective, Auto-Chlor terminated Rope.

Continue reading ›

Many dramas and comedies, on both the small and big screens, have focused on the ups and downs of workplace life. In some situations, though, the conditions at a place of employment can go beyond just normal irritations and inconveniences. One employee, who suffered a stress condition because of her supervisors, sued her employer for discrimination when it terminated her instead of transferring her to a new department. The California Court of Appeal recently ruled that the employee did not have a valid Fair Employment and Housing Act case because her disorder did not amount to a recognized disability under the law.

In 2007, Michaelin Higgins-Williams started a job with Sutter Medical Foundation. In June 2010, Higgins-Williams’ doctor diagnosed her with adjustment disorder after the employee reported experiencing stress stemming from her interaction with Debbie Prince, her immediate supervisor, Norma Perry, a regional manager over both Prince and Higgins-Williams, and Sutter’s human resources department. As a result of that diagnosis, Sutter gave the employee five weeks of leave under the California Family Rights Act and the federal Family and Medical Leave Act.

Continue reading ›

If you’ve suffered discrimination at the hands of your employer, you have a lot to worry about. It is very possible your employer wrongfully terminated you. Even if you succeeded in finding a new job, you probably went through a period of joblessness. For many people, the prospect of taking on a lawsuit under such difficult personal financial circumstances can seem beyond daunting. However, in an important new ruling from the California Supreme Court, employees can remove one hurdle and fear from the equation, since the court decided that employers cannot recover costs from non-frivolous discrimination cases filed under the Fair Employment and Housing Act, even if the employer wins on the merits.

The much-anticipated ruling arose from a disability discrimination lawsuit that a firefighter, Loring Winn Williams, launched against the Chino Valley Independent Fire District. In response to the complaint, the district asked the trial court to award it summary judgment and to order the firefighter to pay its costs. The trial court granted the district’s summary judgment motion and awarded the district costs.

Continue reading ›