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Friday, July 8, 2016
Employment applications sometimes have clauses stating that any dispute between the employer and employee arising out of the employment relationship can only be resolved by a means of alternative dispute resolution, such as binding arbitration, thereby preventing the employee from filing a discrimination lawsuit in State or Federal Court. Many legal minds, including Hope A. Lang, the author of this blog, think that such “ arbitration clauses” in employment applications are contracts of adhesion, and they should not be enforced, i.e., that a Plaintiff should be allowed to file a lawsuit in court rather than have the matter be resolved in binding arbitration. Read more . . .
Friday, July 1, 2016
New Jersey employers’ attempts to radically shorten the filing deadlines for discrimination lawsuits under the state statute have been thwarted by a recent NJ Supreme Court decision. Employment applications sometimes contain clauses that a dispute between the employer and the employee arising out of the employment will have a statute of limitations to file a lawsuit that shortens the two-year limitations period mandated under the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination( NJLAD). These contractual type clauses often limit the time an employee has to file an NJLAD claim to a period as short as six months. Whether an individual employer can so contractually bind an employee to give ups his rights to file a discrimination lawsuit under the NJLAD for the full two-year period, which period was intended by the NJ Legislature, is an issue that has been in the courts for several years.
Finally on June 15, 2016, the Supreme Court of New Jersey reversed two lower courts, and held that private contractual agreements, such as those that are found in employment applications, cannot shorten the two-year statute of limitations to file a lawsuit under the NJLAD.Read more . . .
Monday, June 27, 2016
Family Responsibilities Discrimination, which is not yet a state or federal identified law, sometimes known as “ caregiver discrimination”, is discrimination against employees based on their family-caregiving responsibilities. It involves discrimination against parents of young children, pregnant women, and employees with sick or aging partners or parents. Evidence of such discrimination may consist of: being rejected for hire, harassed, demoted, denied deserved promotion, or wrongfully terminated. Read more . . .
Wednesday, June 1, 2016
There is no specific law in NJ that prohibits an employer from firing you because you asked for a raise. An employer can fire an at-will employee for any reason at all, provided it is not an illegal reason. However, depending on the total facts, the firing could be evidence of a larger pattern of illegal discrimination or illegal retaliation for Read more . . .
Monday, May 23, 2016
Taking care of aging parents, or eldercare, by adult children who are still in the workforce is more common than before as people are retiring later in life, the age to commence receiving full social security benefits may be later than before, depending on the recipient’s birth year, and persons are living longer in the U.S. A federal statute, the Family and Medical Leave Act, (FMLA) and the New Jersey Family Leave Act, (FLA) allow certain covered New Jersey employees who need to take time off from their employment for eldercare to take care of a seriously ill parent and certain other relatives. Not all employees are entitled to such leave however, and not all employers are required to give such time to employees for eldercare and the care of younger parents.
Certain persons who provided care for the employee when the employee was younger, in some instances may be the beneficiaries of these two laws.Read more . . .
Monday, May 16, 2016
Women who are a racial or ethnic minority may experience employer discrimination based on their sex coupled with their race more then than any other demographic. Synergy is defined as the interaction of two or more characteristics or things that produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects. In common terms, when there is synergistic effect, one plus one does not equal two, but equals three or more. Workers who are women and who also are in a Read more . . .
Wednesday, May 4, 2016
In current workplaces, racial and ethnic discrimination in employment can be subtle, particularly in office and other white collar professions, or shockingly blatant. People of color who are have higher education and hold state licensed certifications to legally provide highly skilled services, may be relegated to more menial tasks, which do not even require the expertise and knowledge that they acquired through their education and training. Discrimination based on Read more . . .
Thursday, April 7, 2016
Racial Discrimination is a continuing problem in high income earning managerial and professional positions as well as in blue-collar occupations. Read more . . .
Friday, March 18, 2016
New Jersey has one of the strongest state statutes prohibiting retaliation against employee whistleblowers. It is now well-settled law that even employees who are working as monitors for the employer, sometime known as employee “watchdogs”, whose paid job responsibilities are specifically to monitor, test, evaluate the duties, functions and products of employer, or to report wrongdoings or potential health or safety violations directly to the employer itself to prevent the employer from running afoul of the law, may bring a claim under New Jersey’s Whistleblower statute, the New Jersey Conscientious Employee Protection Act, N.J.S.A.Read more . . .
Monday, March 14, 2016
Employees sometimes find themselves in work situations where they work long hours in excess of 40 hours a week without being paid overtime because the employer misclassified their job description under the Fair Labor Standards Act to avoid paying them overtime payments. This sometimes occurs along with racial discrimination.
The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) establishes the standards for an employee to be eligible for overtime pay and defines which employees are entitled to overtime pay.Read more . . .
Friday, February 19, 2016
Under the New Jersey Pregnant Worker's Fairness Act (PWFA), the New Jersey Legislature added "pregnancy" to the protected list of classes under the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination (LAD). An employer's adverse actions based on the pregnancy of employee became explicitly prohibited under the PWFA, New Jersey Law Against Discrimination pregnancy amendments. Prior to these amendments to the statute, female plaintiffs who brought employment discrimination cases based on pregnancy, had to rely upon other protected classes under the statute to bring their lawsuit, i.e., they had to allege discrimination based on the protected classes of disability, gender, or Read more . . .
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