Disability Discrimination

31st Anniversary of ADA Has Special Significance This Year

July 29, 2021
Thirty-one years ago this week, then-president George H.W. Bush passed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) into law. It was a milestone in Federal law with wide ranging implications throughout US society, and, because of its extension of civil rights workplace protections to those with disabilities, special impact on our own practice in employment law.

Disability Discrimination Is Hurting the Medical Profession

July 26, 2021
A new investigation on the Huffington Post has spotlighted a troubling trend in medicine. Many doctors with disabilities experience persistent discrimination at the hands of other physicians and medical professionals. In a profession that regularly requires workers, especially early career workers, to put in grueling shifts of 80+ hours a week, doctors with disabilities are perceived as unable to live up to the grind.

A Personal Account of Workplace Harassment Highlights How Common the Behavior Is

February 5, 2021
In fact, many of the discrimination cases we take on follow very similar outlines. An employee, even a very senior one, is intimidated, berated, and subjected to mistreatment at the hands of a manager or executive, and has trouble sorting through the proper legal response to the situation.

This Week in FFCRA Complaints: Dismissals While Seeking Paid Leave

September 11, 2020
It appears employers continue to terminate workers who are supposed to be protected under the FFCRA. This week, we’ve highlighted several cases where employees were waiting for test results or already diagnosed with Covid-19 and subsequently fired when seeking paid leave.

This Week’s FFCRA Complaints: The Wrongful Terminations Continue 

August 21, 2020
Since we started this weekly blog post in May, we've read and summarized over 50 complaints filed under the new leave law. As we’ve pointed out, many of these complaints follow almost a template, with workers being terminated for either taking legally-allowed precautions to protect fellow workers from potential infection or for having legitimate reasons to take leave, often to care for a family member or child.

The Week in FFCRA Cases: Judge Invalidates DOL Implementation, Expanding Eligibility

August 18, 2020
The complaints we found relevant this week are eerily similar—parents who need to take care of their children, some of whom are immunocompromised, are being denied telework or leave or are being terminated. Further, we are continuing to see plaintiffs who voice concerns to their employers about workplace safety being terminated after doing so.

The Week in FFCRA Complaints: Yet More Wrongful Terminations and Retaliation

August 10, 2020
As we noted last week, employers seem not to have gotten the message on paid leave under FFCRA and the two notable cases that came up this week both involve employer retaliation and wrongful termination against employees who were protected under FFCRA.

The Week in FFCRA Complaints: Employers Do Not Seem to Understand Mandated Worker Protections

July 31, 2020
t is starting to seem, from our perspective, that either employers have not been made sufficiently aware of the leave entitled to workers under the FFCRA or that they are willing to risk a lawsuit for wrongful termination.

The Week in FFCRA Cases Includes Multiple Worker Complaints in the Food Supply Sector

July 17, 2020
The three cases highlighted in this weeks’ FFCRA complaint roundup include two filed by plaintiffs working in restaurants and another from a plaintiff employed in food distribution. Because the entire food supply chain has been deemed essential, workers in the industry have little ability to leave work to care for sick family members or children since the childcare industry cratered.

The Week in FFCRA Complaints

June 26, 2020
This is the second installment in our roundup of FFCRA complaints. As we noted in the first post, we will be keeping you up to date with all the cases and highlighting the ones that we think have special bearing on our practice, employment law in New York State, or are just particularly noteworthy.

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