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  1. #8
    Join Date
    Oct 2014
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    Default Re: Retaliation for Filing an EEOC Complaint

    A couple of observations. First, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) enforces the federal laws relating to illegal discrimination by employers against employees. Those laws make it illegal for an employer to discriminate against you because of your race, color, national origin, citizenship, religion, sex, age (if you are age 40 or older), disability, or genetic test information. That’s it. If you believe your employer discriminated against you for one of those reasons then your first step is to file a complaint about that with the EEOC. You filed a complaint back in July. If the EEOC thinks there might be merit to your complaint, it will sometimes seek to mediate between you and the employer to try to reach a resolution to the problem. On rare occasions when that fails the EEOC will decide to litigate the case itself for you.

    Unless the EEOC decides to take up the case for you the end result of the EEOC investigation is that you get a “right to sue” letter. Understand something very important about the right to sue letter: it does not mean that the EEOC thinks you have a good claim against the employer. The only thing it means is that the EEOC has decided not to litigate the case for you. The significance of the letter to you is that you need to have that letter before you may go to court and sue the employer yourself for a violation of the federal employment discrimination laws. So not hearing from the EEOC would generally tell you the case is still open. You would have received a right to sue letter if the EEOC closed the investigation.

    Your state laws may have a different process for violations of its employment discrimination laws, and you’d want to make sure that you also comply with that process if the employer violated the state law, too.

    With that in mind, if the employer terminated you either because of illegal discrimination or because of illegal retaliation for making the first EEOC complaint, you do want to make a second complaint about that. I’m concerned the person you spoke with at the EEOC might not have understood that you were calling to report additional discriminatory acts by the employer. If you do not get a complaint in about the termination you might lose the right to sue for that. You really want to make the complaint in writing to help document it in case the employer challenges that later. You may want to have a lawyer who litigates illegal discrimination cases to help with that. You need to ensure that the complaint gets done within as little as 180 days in some states (though in others it will be 300 days). So if you think the employer illegally discriminated against you, I would suggest you not wait to find a lawyer. Do it now, discuss what happened at your job with the lawyer, and see if you have a case worth pursuing.

    That said, I’m not seeing anything that jumps out at me here that indicates the employer illegally discriminated against you or retaliated against you for the EEOC filing. The employer found an undisclosed misdemeanor in your background check and that took time to sort out. There is nothing illegal about that. The company could have just fired you then because of that if it wanted to get rid of you. But instead the company gave you the promotion you applied for. If the company didn’t like you because of your race, sex, religion, or whatever, it would seem unlikely that it would give you a promotion. Now the company terminated you for allegedly taking excessive breaks. If that is the real reason for the termination (regardless of whether the company is right about the breaks you took) that is not illegal.

    Could the company have really terminated you in retailiation for the EEOC complaint? It’s possible, but you haven’t pointed to any evidence of it. You don’t even seem to know if the company had yet been informed of the complaint by the EEOC. And so far, it appears the EEOC has taken no action against the employer because of it. So why would the company retailiate if the complaint isn’t going to go anywhere? In any event, if you sue claiming retailiation you have the burden to prove it. Thus you need to have evidence that shows the company retaliated. If you have no evidence to support it, you’ll lose.

    Finally, let me make a minor suggestion for future posts. If you could break longer posts down into paragraphs, capitalize the start of each sentence, and end each sentence with just one period instead of four it will make your posts much easier to read. I had kind of a hard time wading through that big block of text. If you make it easier to read, more people will read it and you’ll get more input.

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