Discrimination

Persons sometimes think that the issue of voting rights has no direct bearing on them personably. These are typically persons who have not experienced their names being wrongly purged from voter registration lists, nor prevented from voting, or having their votes not be counted by other unanticipated voter suppression methods. However, when you cast your vote for elected officials, you are casting your vote for your representatives who will draft, promote and vote on passing laws that expand your rights as an employee or diminish them. These are laws that establish rights for employees who are members of a protected class, such as race, gender, disability, pregnancy, sex, sexual orientation, members of the Armed Forces, etc. The laws also define the classes that are legally protected from job discrimination.

A far too common complaint voiced by commercial truck drivers are the exorbitant demands placed upon them by their employers to drive an excessive amount of time without breaks. While it’s a profit-driven motive on the part of businesses, it disregards the potential dangers to the public and such practices frequently run afoul of the law.

Sometimes when employees complain or object to their employers that the excessive driving without sufficient breaks runs contrary to State Vehicle Code Regulations for such drivers, their employers remain impenitent about their dangerous practices and continue to enforce such demands upon their drivers. In New Jersey, if you complain about such practices that run afoul of the law and your employer retaliates against you, you may have a valid whistleblower  claim under the  New Jersey Conscientious Employee Protection Act, N.J.

Black male workers have often come to me because they earn less than others on their job who do the same work but are a different race. If you are doing substantially the same job as others of a different race but are paid less, then you may with some exceptions have a claim for discrimination under the Diane B. Allen Equal Pay Act. I have successfully represented Black men and other minorities who suffered harassment and illegal wage and salary discrimination and was successful in recovering money for them.

You do not have to experience overt racial harassment to bring a race discrimination claim under the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination.

It is unfortunate and sometimes illegal that employers will give pay raises to older male workers, but decline to give the same increases to their older female workers. If you are an older female worker who is not give raises on par with your male counterparts, you may have a claim for unequal pay under the Diane B. Allen Equal Pay Act. I have represented numerous NJ employees whose employers illegally discriminated against them in wages and salary and was successful in recovering money for them.

This Act awards trebles damages to a plaintiff who was illegally discriminated against in pay because of  sex or gender (and other protected classes).

Female Hispanic workers have a double whammy of an unequal pay gap between them and white males doing comparable work. Studies show both race and sex contribute to the wide gap between them and white male employees more than any other comparison of races, ethnicities, and sex.

Quite surprisingly, in New Jersey, the pay gap between Hispanic women and white men is the largest in the United States according to the NJ governor’s office.

According to several surveys, female Hispanic employees have largest disparity in pay between themselves and comparable white male workers, more than any other demographic. This is true across the board in every occupation in the United States.

Wage discrimination in your past employment positions should not follow you into your future employment! Unfortunately, up until January 1, 2020, it was legal for prospective employers in New Jersey to ask applicants what they earned in their prior employment. Employers would frequently then scale down their offer of wages proximate to the applicant’s prior earnings in their former employment, i.e., pay as little as they could get away with while still maintaining a work force. This perpetuated the historic wage discrimination practices.

On August 24, 2021, the US House of Representatives approved The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, named for the civil rights leader and Georgia Congressman John Lewis, who died in 2020. This new bill aims to restore the full protections of the original, bipartisan Voting Rights Act of 1965. It has been widely discussed that the bill faces an uphill battle in the Senate.

Although the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was reauthorized by Congress in 2006, the Supreme Court eviscerated it in 2013 in the Shelby County v. Holder decision.

New Jersey’s top law enforcer announced in a press release in August that an employer, Academy Bus Lines, must pay a former driver $40,000.00 for firing him because he took a leave to care for his dying father. According to the investigation, the Hoboken-based company fired the bus driver after he began intermittent leave under the New Jersey Family Leave Act. (FLA).

The FLA is an Act to provide employees with newly-born or adopted children or seriously ill family members temporary leave from their employment, and guaranteeing job security and certain benefits during this leave.

Harriet Tubman Planned, Organized and Successfully Led a Union Military Operation Against Confederate Troops During the Civil War.

After the Union gave Harriet Tubman her new orders for her to organize an espionage ring to help the Union Armed Forces defeat the Confederate States Armed Forces, the Union Army subsequently asked her to lead a military operation in South Carolina, which mission she accepted. Harriet Tubman made her last trip as a conductor on the Underground Railroad in December 1860. But her work for the cause of liberty and the emancipation of slaves had not ended.

Relying on intelligence that Tubman had gathered through her espionage network, Colonel James Montgomery asked Tubman in 1863 to lead a secret military mission against Confederate Armed Forces in South Carolina Harriot Tubman was the only woman known to have led a military operation during the American Civil War.

The Union Army recruited Harriet Tubman to work as a covert operative as described in Parts 1 and II of this series on this brave leader. She traveled to a Union Army camp in South Carolina supposedly to aid the former Black slaves who had been given sanctuary with the Union troops, but she was there for espionage work on behalf of the Union. The skills Tubman had acquired as a conductor on the  Underground Railroad served her work as a covert operative for the Union. Because she was from Maryland and not South Carolina, she was not familiar with the ways of South Carolina or their dialect, which made communication with them difficult. They resented the rations the Union Army gave to her.

If your boss starts treating you poorly or discriminates against you because he/she learn of your association with person(s) of a race other than your own race or ethnicity, that is “Associational Discrimination”. The New Jersey Law Against Discrimination is sufficiently latitudinous to allow race and ethnic discrimination claims to proceed based on the Plaintiff’s association with a person of a different race or ethnicity.

By way of example, a white waitress works at her job for several years, and when the employer learns she is dating a Black man, her shifts get cut. A long-term worker brings her children to an employer-sponsored party where the employer learns that her children are bi-racial, and subsequently the promotion she was promised is given to someone else. Or a secretary who is known at work to be Jewish tells her boss that she is married to an Egyptian Muslim, and she thereafter is “let go” in a bogus restructuring.