Especially in Alabama, people tend to talk about discrimination like it was something that happened in the past. We have all seen pictures of the segregated water fountains and public bathrooms that used to be right here in Huntsville. Perhaps when you were in elementary school, you had an elderly teacher who told you that she chose to enter the teaching profession because, when she was young, it was virtually the only intellectually challenging and rewarding line of work available to women. You might assume that just because the mistreatment you are experiencing at work is not as egregious as that, it must not really be discrimination, but this is not the case.
Employment discrimination is any adverse action that an employer takes against an employee when the motivation for doing this is a protected characteristic of the employee. Federal and state employment laws recognize a wide variety of protected characteristics and a wide variety of adverse actions. Exercising your right to compensation for employment discrimination requires a complex legal process. The Huntsville employment discrimination lawyers at HKM Employment Attorneys, LLP, can help you follow the procedural steps while seeking justice for employment discrimination.
What is a Protected Characteristic?
There are several reasons an employer might take an adverse action, such as demotion or termination of employment, against an employee. One is that the employee’s actions at work warranted this adverse action. If you are chronically absent from work without notice and without justifiable reason, your employer has every right to fire you. Likewise, it only makes sense for your employer to fire you if you steal money from the cash register. In other words, adverse actions as a response to poor performance or misconduct by the employee are perfectly legal. If you do not have an employment contract, your employer can fire you for no reason at all. Being a jerk might make your boss persona non grata in Alabama, the land of Southern charm, but it does not always make your employer liable for employment discrimination; in the absence of evidence that the motivations for firing you were discriminatory, it does not.
Claims of employment discrimination only apply if a protected characteristic of the employee was a motivation for the employer’s adverse action. The following are examples of protected characteristics:
- Race, ethnic background, skin color, or hair texture
- Religion or lack of religious faith
- National origin or citizenship status, as long as the employee is legally authorized to work in the United States
- Sex, marital status, sexual orientation, parenthood or childlessness, or gender presentation (perceived masculine or feminine appearance or behavior)
- Age, if the employee is at least 40 years old
- Military veteran status
- Disability, whether disclosed by the employee or perceived by the employer
In other words, protected characteristics related to your body or to your personal history outside of work. Employers can fire you because of what you did or didn’t do at your current job. They can also base their hiring decisions on your previous work experience and your performance at previous jobs. They cannot, however, refuse to hire you because of who you are.
Are Adverse Actions Always Discriminatory?
Claims of employment discrimination are often one person’s word against another’s. Everyone can agree that when your company did a restructuring to save on costs, it only laid off one employee, and that employee was you. You might claim that it is because you are a mother of minor children and you have gotten phone calls from your children’s school several times while you were at work.
Meanwhile, your employer might deny this and say that it was because you had the least seniority. To prove that an action was discriminatory, you must go on something more than just your gut feeling that your employer has it in for you. The employment discrimination lawyers at HKM Employment Attorneys LLP can help you document the discriminatory behavior of your work supervisors and coworkers before and during the adverse action to lend support to your claim of discrimination.
How to Pursue an Employment Discrimination Complaint
The good news is that the law sets out pathways by which employees who have experienced discrimination at work can seek compensation for the financial losses they have incurred because of the discrimination; in the most egregious cases, the employees can even get noneconomic damages for emotional distress. The bad news is that it is not a quick process, and it requires patience and meticulousness on the part of the employee.
With an employment discrimination claim, you cannot just angrily type up a complaint on a template downloaded from the courthouse’s website, walk into court when business hours begin, and file a lawsuit, like you can when someone damages your property or refuses to repay a debt. Instead, you must go through the preliminary investigation phase first.
This begins with you contacting the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) no more than 45 days after the discriminatory action. You then meet with an EEOC counselor and describe the incident and the reasons you think that it counts as discrimination. After that, the EEOC will conduct a preliminary investigation. The purpose of the investigation is to corroborate your statements to see if they are credible and also to discover other discriminatory practices at your workplace, if any. For example, the EEOC might find out that other employees have also experienced discrimination, even if they did not report it to the EEOC on their own initiative.
At the end of the investigation, the EEOC will decide whether to authorize you to file a lawsuit. The court will only accept your employment discrimination lawsuit if the EEOC has already authorized it. The chances that your lawsuit will reach a settlement are greater than the chances that it will go to trial.
HKM Attorneys for Employment Discrimination
The Huntsville employment lawyers at HKM Employment Attorneys, LLP, can help you if you have experienced discrimination at your job. Contact our employment lawyers in Huntsville, to set up a consultation.
