This newspaper features a “Faith” section every week. There are at least five Christian channels on our cable television. The Amarillo yellow pages directory contains at least 20 pages of church listings. Religion is alive and well in the Panhandle of Texas.

But is it appropriate to bring religion into your workplace? For many people, it is as natural as breathing to talk about, think about and pray about their faith and their struggles while at work as well as elsewhere.

But as a business owner or manager, you have to be very careful and knowledgeable about how to handle your employees’ and your own religious beliefs. While about 75% of Americans professed to be Christians in 2000, there are another 13% who said they are secular or nonreligious, and the rest practiced Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, agnosticism, atheism, Hinduism, Wiccan, etc.

Even if an employee professes to be a Christian, he or she could be involved in any one of the 38,000 Christian denominations worldwide that Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary identified in 2006. Many of these denominations have very different practices and traditions from your church. Just assuming that all of your employees believe the way that you believe is naïve and could be legally costly.

Continue reading Religion in the Workplace →

           With the debate over illegal immigration raging in this country, it seems like a good time to remind employers about the present laws concerning racial and national origin discrimination.

            No matter what your beliefs are about illegal immigration and those who protest in support of or against it, as an employer you must be careful to make employment decisions based only on job qualifications, not on your perception of or the actuality of an employee’s race or place of birth.

            Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, employers cannot discriminate in the terms and conditions of employment based on where an applicant or an employee, or his ancestors, originated. You also cannot discriminate because someone’s race is Hispanic, Arab or otherwise.

Continue reading Preventing Racial & Ethnic Discrimination →

            Is your company ripe for a glass ceiling claim against it? If you answered “What’s a glass ceiling claim?” then you may have already lost the battle.

            A glass ceiling suit is one in which lower level employees that are women argue that they are ineligible for promotion not because of a lack of ability on their part but because the upper levels of management in a company are reserved for males. The women seek equal advancement opportunities, often by filing class action suits.

            The latest glass ceiling case in the news concerns a class action gender discrimination suit against Wal-Mart, in which the plaintiffs claim that women are paid less than men in Wal-Mart’s stores even when they have higher performance ratings and greater seniority, receive fewer promotions and have to wait longer than men to be promoted.

Continue reading Glass Ceiling →

         I often write about age discrimination cases in this column because they are one of the most common and expensive claims an employer faces. Older workers who lose their jobs aren’t shy about suing and they make very sympathetic plaintiffs to a jury.

Here I am writing about age discrimination again because this spring the U. S. Supreme Court released a significant age discrimination opinion that employers need to understand and beware.

            In Smith v. City of Jackson, the Court ruled that workers over age 40 can sue their employers for age discrimination by claiming that a neutral practice or policy unintentionally discriminates against these older workers. For example, a corporate training program that focuses on developing the skills of younger workers because of their potential longevity at the company could be said to be discriminatory against older workers and therefore adversely impact that protected class of people.

Continue reading Supreme Court Expands Age Discrimination →

            I have often said in seminars that I have taught that the scariest kinds of employment cases I defend are age discrimination claims. Give me a good old-fashioned sexual harassment claim any day compared to a long-term employee over 40 who was fired so the company could “go in a new direction”.

            Age discrimination cases are difficult to defend because jurors, like all of us, want to believe that employers will be loyal to them when they get older. We all hate the thought of our parents or ourselves being fired simply because the employer no longer finds us useful as we inevitably age.

            This makes age discrimination cases very expensive. The median age discrimination verdict in federal courts from 1994-2000 was $269,350, higher than for any other type of federally prohibited discrimination. That only takes into account the damages awarded to the plaintiff, not the other $75,000+ that the employer spent on lawyer fees to defend the case.

            Employers know these facts instinctively, so they often come up with all kinds of ways to soften the blow when an older worker has to be fired.

            Euphemisms seem to breed like mice in age discrimination contexts. I’ve heard employers call their older employees “dinosaurs”, suggest that their idea of technology never progressed beyond a Selectric typewriter, and suggest to an employee that it is time to retire and go fishing, perhaps thinking that the older worker would suddenly act as if a light went on in his head and happily go out the office door whistling the theme from the Andy Griffith show.

            In real life these types of euphemisms only enrage the employee even more than the firing and lead to a nasty lawsuit. Continue reading Stray Remarks in Age Discrimination Cases →