Disability Discrimination

Increasing numbers of employees are caring for aging parents and must take a leave from their employment to care for the needs of an older parent. If you are a New Jersey employee who is covered under New Jersey’s Family Leave Act, you are entitled to leave time to take care of parents or other family member with a significant health issue. Covered employers must restore employees to the same or an equivalent position upon return from the family leave, i.e., restoration to a position with the same pay, benefits, and seniority.

There is good news on the horizon for the majority of New Jersey employees, in that shortly before leaving office, former New Jersey Governor Philip Murphy signed into law Senate bill 2950 and Assembly bill 3451 which greatly expands protections for Family Leave for the majority of New Jersey employees. The bill takes effect on July 14, 2026. The signed A3451/S2950 amended the New Jersey Family Leave Act several major ways to cover more employees by broadening eligibility for employee job-protected leave under the New Jersey Family Leave Act and by covering more employers under its definitions.

The New Jersey Family Leave Act allows covered employees to take unpaid time off from work to take care of a care of a sick or disabled relative, including to care for seriously ill aging parents, (even if the illness is temporary) or a spouse, or other relative.  The New Jersey Family Leave Act also allows covered employees to take unpaid time off from work when there is a birth or adoption of a child.

In New Jersey, commissions always constitute "wages" whenever a NJ employer compensates an employee by paying a commission for labor or services rendered by the employee. Commissions are not “supplementary incentives” under New Jersey's Wage Payment Law.

Commissions are “wages” and as wages, commissions have all the legal protections of New Jersey Wage Payment Law (WPL), N.J.S.

Many are shocked to learn that the characteristics of “weight” or “height’ are not designated protected characteristics which prohibits employment discrimination against an individual because of their “weight” or “height’ under the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination or under Federal Civil Rights Statutes such as Title VII. There is a bill in New Jersey which aims to rectify this egregious wrong for NJ employees. It is logical for one to assume that “weight” or “height”, would be protected characteristics preventing an individual from employment discrimination based on those characteristics, but that is not yet the law. When there are many other protected characteristics under the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination, such as sex, race, etc., it defies reason and is unconscionable that one’s height and weight are not also protected characteristics.

In order to state a claim of illegal discrimination under the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination, N.J.S.A. 10:5-1 et.

If you are a person with a disability, either temporary or permanent, who could have continued in employment if your employer how agreed to a reasonable accommodation to allow you to carry out the essential functions of your job, but your employer refused and instead terminated you, or harassed you into resigning, you are not alone. Unfortunately, too many employers just cannot be bothered to make any reasonable accommodations to allow workers to keep working. Supervisors and those with the authority to hire and fire,  either set aside their own personal sympathy to fall into line with an employer’s frequently illegal rules of “No Exceptions”,  fearing for their own job security if they lobby to expand what could be certain illegal parameters of a  “No Exceptions” rule; or else they have no cognizant sympathy for a worker with a disability (until of course, they themselves get cancer, have a serious leg impairment, or receive a diagnosed heart condition, etc.) Unscrupulous employers will sometimes begin issuing unjustified negative evaluations of the employee’s work to lay a bogus paper trail in case they subsequently have to defend on a discrimination claim. See Employee Performance Evaluations.

Discrimination based on religion or ethnicity are frequently intertwined and may overlap with bias against other legal classes who are protected from discrimination. In matters of religious discrimination, it frequently encompasses a bias against several protected classes which span multiple categories, including national origin/religious discrimination; race/religion; ethnicity/religion; color/religion. There is an overlap in all of these categories, e.g., race and ethnic origin are frequently intertwined and open to opinion, such as a person whom others categorize as being Hispanic, may themselves identify as being African American, Caucasian or Pan-Asian.

The New Jersey Law Against Discrimination is broad enough to prohibit discrimination based on a perceived disability even if you are not in fact disabled. Employment discrimination based your employer’s perception that you are disabled may lead to a wrongful termination. Under the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination, N.J.S.

Persons with a disability, or who had a temporary disability, have a right to be employed! Persons with disabilities have a civil right to employment as much as any non-disabled person has a right to employment. If you are an employee who became temporarily or permanently disabled and requested a reasonable accommodation so you can perform the essential functions of your job, and your employer began giving you unjustified poor performance evaluations, starting shutting you out of meetings, assigned you a new unreasonable workload you had never been previously assigned, you are not alone. Unfortunately, these are tactics that an unsavvy employer may use to pressure an employee into resigning. See Employment Attorney, I Was Put on a PIP: the Dangers of a PIP.

There are stereotypes which leads employers to believe that persons with disabilities will be not be able to take on and advance in complex tasks and responsibilities and supervise others because of perceived limitations which have no basis in fact, but they are associated with disability in general or with specific chronic health condition stereotypes.