Employment

Contractual employees may be aghast if they are terminated in violation of their written contract. Employees who are employed according to the terms of a contract generally feel more secure in their position than those who work “at-will” without a contract. This may be particularly true of long-term employees and those holding executive positions because of the amount of time they have invested in the position. With a contract, they initially have more security as to their remaining employed, their wages and certain terms of their position such as expected hours, mandatory travel, etc., and the employer’s responsibilities to be maintained according to the terms of the contract.

Employees who have worked for the same employer for 10, 20, or 30 years may find they are terminated for no apparent reason. There is always a reason but the reason may be legal or illegal. If you find yourself in such a position, you should contact this office immediately for a free consultation. I have represented both private and public employees who were fired for no apparent reason and was successful for recovering money compensating for them for lost wages, projected lost future raises, and pain and suffering.

If you have not already been finally severed from the position and are still working until the designated end-date, you should contact this office immediately before the designated termination date.

Municipality, County, State workers who are 70 years of age and older, should be made aware that their government employer can no longer force them out of their job based on their age. Amendments to the NJ Law Against Discrimination which went into effect on October 5, 2021, eliminated a loophole in the law which some government employers could utilize as a means to get rid of older workers and replace them with younger ones.

Prior to these Amendments, a NJ municipality, county, state agency or employer had to demonstrate that a such government employee’s mandatory retirement age bore, “a manifest relationship to employment in question.” This appellation, “a manifest relationship” was a legal slippery slope, an opinion too easy for any governmental entity to allege. This appellation perpetuated negative aging myths because it was prejudice, judgment or opinion formed against older workers predicated on the public employee’s age.

Employees with a disability which requires a reasonable accommodation to allow them to do their job, should ask for the accommodation in writing. This puts the employer on notice of their legal duty to engage in an interactive process with the employee to be able to provide the accommodation. An employer-employee interactive process is necessary when the employer cannot immediately provide the articulated accommodation requested. For example, teacher with diabetes who requests that her lunch period be moved from 3 pm to 11:30 am so as to not suffer a hypoglycemic event, has a clearly defined request for an accommodation that the employer can understand. There may be no need in some situations for the employer to engage in the interactive process if the employer can provide the requested accommodation.

Employers will sometimes scam employees by giving them a title of “Administrator” to have them be salaried employees who are not entitled to overtime. An employee entitled as an “Administrator” may nevertheless be legally entitled to overtime payments if certain criteria are met.

Both the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and New Jersey Wage and Hour Laws which incorporate much of the FMLA, define the circumstances by which employees are exempt from the right to receive overtime payments.

Job Title of “Administrator” Is Insufficient to Deny Overtime

Under the FLSA and Federal Code 29 CFR 541.2, a job title alone is insufficient to establish the exempt status of an employee to which the employee would otherwise be entitled to overtime pay.

Gendered expectations frequently affect a male subordinate’s acceptance of constructive criticism from his supervisor when the supervisor happens to be woman.

Females in leadership positions have hurdles to overcome that males do not experience. Some males consciously or otherwise, do not take the opinions of a female seriously and resent it when their work is criticized by a woman; they feel she is not qualified to render such an opinion. Some male subordinates tend to dismiss the competence of their female supervisor if she gives him poor performance evaluations or places him on a PIP. Such male subordinates may attempt to discredit the competence of the female supervisor in retaliation for the female leader’s negative feedback of his work.

The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (“ADEA”), 29 U.S.C. §§ 621 et seq., bars discrimination because of an employee’s age, meaning that it prohibits employment age discrimination where age is the cause of the employer’s adverse decision, which is frequently termination.

When high-end professionals are whistleblowers at publicly traded mega-companies and other companies, the employer might have anticipated such a possibility and have documentation demonstrating some level of dissatisfaction with that employee’s work. Some savvy employers might even have a practice being sufficiently sagacious to have written a notation in many upper-level employees’ files documenting a less than 100% satisfaction with the employee’s judgment or performance, whether it be justified or not. This practice can be business practice pre-emptive defense in case the employee is terminated and files a lawsuit for wrongful termination.

In New Jersey, an employee bringing a case under the  New Jersey Conscientious Employee Protection Act, N.J.

New Jersey increased its minimum wage to $14.13 an hour commencing January 1, 2023 for most workers. New Jersey’s increase in the minimum wage by $1.13 an hour in many occupations is insufficient for most workers to sustain themselves. Further, it segregates by occupation and is class biased.

If a supervisor makes egregious comments about a person’s co-workers outside of the hearing range of such co-workers, it can be very disturbing nevertheless to the person hearing the offensive language who works in such an atmosphere. When the offensive speech targets employees who are in a protected class such as women or racial minorities, it can be further disturbing to hear these comments even when he/she may not be in the group being maligned; i.e., a male worker hearing explicit egregious repugnant sexual comments or jokes about his female co-workers, or a white worker hearing offensive derogatory racist comments, jokes or epithets about employees of color.

If a New Jersey employee hearing such discriminatory comments reasonably believes such comments to be violating discrimination law and reports it to a supervisor, and the employer subsequently retaliates against the complaining employee, the employee may have a claim for illegal retaliation in certain instances under the Law Against Discrimination, N.

Workers sometimes may find themselves doing substantially the same job as their co-workers although they are paid less. There may be valid legal reasons for this, i.e., the number of years working for the employer, seniority rules, merit system, collective bargaining agreements, etc. In New Jersey, if the disparity in pay is due to your being a member of a protected class, such as sex, race, age, etc.