If you are a New Jersey employee and you overhear or learn secondhand that someone is using offensive language to disparage you or others based on protected class characteristics such as race, age, sex, disability, sexual orientation, etc., you may qualify as a victim of a discriminatory based hostile work…
Retaliatory adverse employment actions are not only limited to termination. If an employer engages in a bad faith or a sham internal investigation against an employee after the employee blew the whistle about conduct, he or she reasonably believed violated the law, was fraudulent, or was contrary to public policy,…
Sexual harassment is not typically about lust or the desire for sex. Rather, at its core its typically about exerting control and domination over subordinates in the workplace. Such is the case involving New York Governor Andrew Cuomo where numerous allegations of sexual harassment, intimidation, and retaliation culminated in his…
A survey conducted this past January by the nonprofit Stop Street Harassment found that 81% of women had experienced some form of sexual harassment during their lifetime. Given this troubling statistic, it is not surprising that a recent series of twenty-five sexual harassment complaints have been filed with the U.S.…
In New Jersey an employer cannot recover damages from their employee caused by the employee’s negligent errors or omissions. Incredibly, this was not always the case. At one time, our New Jersey courts permitted employers to sue their employees to recover monies it the employer had to pay to third…
America is in the middle of a social reckoning. Brave women are standing up and telling their stories of sexual harassment, assault, or other abuses by men in positions of power through use of the hashtag, #MeToo. The #MeToo movement, focused primarily on sharing stories of abuse, evolved into a…
Under the federal American with Disabilities Act (“ADA”), and the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination (“LAD”), a disabled employee is entitled to be reasonably accommodated by their employer so long as to do so does not create an undue hardship for the employer or coworkers. However, for an employee to…
The federal Family Medical Leave Act (“FMLA”), 29 U.S.C. §§ 2601-2654 and New Jersey Family Leave Act (“NJFLA”) N.J.S.A. 34:11B-1 et. seq. permits employees to take 12 weeks of protected unpaid leave when they or their immediate family suffer a serious medical condition or for a new born child. This allows the…
Many professions require a person to be licensed before they can work in their chosen field such as medicine, nursing, law, dentistry, teaching, accounting, pharmacy, psychology, engineering, and architecture, to name a few. Many, if not all, of these professions require the practitioner to adhere to a professional code of…
A constructive discharge occurs when conditions at work become so unlawfully and intolerably hostile an employee is left with no choice but to resign. Previously, to recover under New Jersey’s Whistleblower Law – the Conscientious Employee Protection Act (CEPA) – a litigant was required to prove actual or constructive discharge.…