New Jersey Employment Attorneys Blog

A HOMAGE TO THE LATE SUPREME COURT JUSTICE RUTH BADER GINSBURG

Published on: September 24, 2020 | by Mashel Law, L.L.C.

With the passing of United States Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (March 15, 1933 – September 18, 2020) this country lost an irreplaceable and implacable advocate for the bedrock notion that every person regardless of their sex, race, national origin, disability or sexual orientation, or other unique or protected characteristic, should be treated equally under the law. In the employment context, a great example of Justice Ginsburg’s spirited pursuit of equality for all is found in her dissenting opinion in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., 550 U.S. 618 (2007). This dissent helped to galvanize the later passage and signing into law of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act which makes clear that pay discrimination claims on the basis of sex, race, national origin, age, religion and disability, accrue whenever a discriminatory pay decision or practice is adopted, or when a person becomes subject to the decision or practice, or when a person is affected by the disparate pay decision or practice, including whenever s/he receives a discriminatory paycheck

Lilly Ledbetter was one of a few female supervisors at the Goodyear plant in Gadsden, Alabama. She suspected she was getting fewer and lower pay raises than similarly situated male supervisors but had no proof until she received an anonymous note revealing the salaries of three of the male managers. After she filed a complaint with the EEOC, her case went to trial, and the jury awarded her back-pay and approximately $3.3 million in compensatory and punitive damages for the extreme nature of the pay discrimination.

The Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit reversed the jury verdict, holding that her case was filed too late – even though Ms. Ledbetter continued to receive discriminatory pay – because the company’s original decision on her pay had been made years earlier. In a 5-4 decision authored by Justice Alito, the Supreme Court upheld the Eleventh Circuit decision and ruled that employees cannot challenge ongoing pay discrimination if the employer’s original discriminatory pay decision occurred outside of the statute of limitations period – which in Alabama was a mere 180- day period – even when the employee continues to receive paychecks that have been discriminatorily reduced.

NEW JERSEY CLASS ACTION CERTIFIED FOR DISABILITY DISCRIMINATION

Published on: September 11, 2020 | by Mashel Law, L.L.C.

It is possible to certify discrimination claims brought under the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination, N.J.S.A. 10:5-1 et seq. (“LAD”) as class action claims. In Alleyne v. NJ Transit 2020 N.J. Super. Unpub. LEXIS 1686 (Law Div., decided Aug. 28, 2020) a New Jersey trial court certified a class action for disability discrimination. In 2018, Plaintiff Anthony Alleyne filed a class action lawsuit against his employer, the New Jersey Transit Corporation (NJ Transit), alleging that NJ Transit violated the LAD by discriminating against him based on his disability, sleep apnea. The court granted Alleyne’s motion to certify the following class: “individuals who were removed from service with NJ Transit and required to submit to sleep apnea testing while employed by NJ Transit at any time from September 19, 2016 to present.”

On October 5, 2016, Alleyne attended his routine physical examination. During the exam, Alleyne’s body mass index and neck circumference were measured. The doctor conducting the examination informed Alleyne that he believed Alleyne may have sleep apnea. Based on the doctor’s suspicions, NJ Transit removed Alleyne from service that same day. At that time, Alleyne was employed as a locomotive engineer.

Once removed, Alleyne was required by NJ Transit to undergo further testing and was diagnosed with mild to moderate sleep apnea. He was informed that, based on the results of his tests, NJ Transit required him to wear a Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) machine and maintain a certain level of compliance before he could return to work. He paid out of pocket for the costs of tests incurred from the treatments and examinations required by NJ Transit. NJ Transit did not reimburse him for the costs and did not compensate him for the time he spent out of service.

COVID-19 AS A COVERED DISABILITY UNDER NEW JERSEY LAW

Published on: August 31, 2020 | by Mashel Law, L.L.C.

Federal and state disability discrimination laws do not currently address whether COVID-19 is a covered disability under their respective statutory schemes. However, given the liberality by which New Jersey’s Law Against Discrimination, N.J.S.A., 10:5-1, et. seq. (the “LAD”) is to be applied and considering the recent enactment of a New Jersey law prohibiting employer’s from taking adverse employment actions against employees who take or request time off due to an infectious disease such as COVID-19, it is likely our New Jersey courts will conclude that contraction and/or documented exposure to COVID-19 will be deemed a covered disability under the LAD.

In Tihara Worthy v. Wellington Estates LLC, et. al., filed in the New Jersey Superior Court on June 15, 2020, Plaintiff Tihara Worthy sued her former employer, Wellington Estates LLC, for wrongful termination, alleging the employer terminated her employment because she had contracted coronavirus disease 2019 (“COVID-19”). Ms. Worthy alleged her termination violated the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination (“LAD”) and common law. According to her complaint, Ms. Worthy worked as a Certified Medical Assistant in Wellington Estates LLC’s senior living and assisted living community in Spring Lake, New Jersey. On or about April 19, 2020, she learned she had tested positive for COVID-19. She immediately notified her employer and commenced a leave of absence. On or about May 11, 2020, after a month-long leave of absence, Ms. Worthy tested negative for COVID-19 and was given a return-to-work date of May 16, 2020. However, before she was scheduled to return to work, her employer’s Executive Director telephoned her and told her she was not welcome to return to work because she had contracted COVID-19 and “could have gotten everyone sick.”

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) defines “disability” as “a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities.” 42 U.S.C.S. § 12102. The LAD defines “disability” as “physical or sensory disability, infirmity, malformation, or disfigurement which is caused by bodily injury, birth defect, or illness…resulting from anatomical, psychological, physiological, or neurological conditions which prevents the typical exercise of any bodily or mental functions or is demonstrable, medically or psychologically, by accepted clinical or laboratory diagnostic techniques.” N.J.S.A., 10:5-5(q). Hence, as compared to the ADA, the LAD does not contain a requirement that a disability substantially limit a major life activity, as the ADA definition does; thus, an employee who contracts COVID-19 but is not substantially limited in a major life activity may be disabled under the LAD even if found not to be so under the ADA.

Expanded Protections for New Jersey Workers

Published on: August 19, 2020 | by Mashel Law, L.L.C.

Good news for New Jersey workers! New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy enacted amendments to the New Jersey Wage and Hour Law, effective August 6, 2019, and New Jersey Family Leave Insurance (FLI), effective July 1, 2020, and the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development recently offered extended benefits to unemployed workers. Among other changes to the Wage and Hour Law, the recent legislation increases the statute of limitations from two years to six years and provides for liquidated damages up to 200% of the amount of wages lost. The major amendments to New Jersey FLI are a doubling of the leave period from 6 weeks to 12 weeks and an increase in the benefit rate from 66 2/3% to 85% of a claimant’s average weekly wage. Unemployment benefits have been extended from 26 to 46 weeks.

New Jersey Wage and Hour Law

Statute of Limitations: Employees now have six years, instead of two years, to bring a claim for unpaid minimum wages or unpaid overtime compensation. N.J.S.A., 34:11-56a25.1.

QUALIFIED IMMUNITY PROTECTS ROGUE POLICE OFFICERS AND PUBLIC OFFICIALS FROM CIVIL LIABILITY

Published on: July 31, 2020 | by Mashel Law, L.L.C.

Protests ignited by the killing of George Floyd put a spotlight on the legal doctrine of qualified immunity. To successfully sue a police officer for excessive or abusive conduct, or to sue some other government official for violating your civil rights, a Plaintiff must demonstrate the offending public employee knew or should have known their alleged misconduct violated established law. “The doctrine of qualified immunity protects government officials from civil damages liability when their actions could reasonably have been believed to be legal.” Morgan v. Swanson, 659 F.3d 359, 370–71 (5th Cir. 2011). Officials are entitled to qualified immunity “unless (1) they violated a federal statutory or constitutional right, and (2) the unlawfulness of their conduct was ‘clearly established at the time.’” District of Columbia v. Wesby, 138 S. Ct. 577, 589 (2018) (quoting Reichle v. Howards, 566 U.S. 658, 664 (2012)).

The purpose of qualified immunity is to “balance two important interests – the need to hold public officials accountable when they exercise power irresponsibly and the need to shield officials from harassment, distraction, and liability when they perform their duties reasonably.” Pearson v. Callahan, 555 U.S. 223, 231 (2009). Whether an official is covered by qualified immunity is a matter of law to be decided by a court, “preferably on a properly supported motion for summary judgment or dismissal.” Wildoner v. Borough of Ramsey, 162 N.J. 375, 387 (2000).

The overly broad and vexing protections afforded rogue public actors by qualified immunity was well framed by Fifth Circuit Judge Don R. Willett in his concurring opinion in Zadeh v. Robinson, 928 F. 3d 457 (5^th Cir. 2018):

UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT NARROWS EMPLOYMENT PROTECTIONS FROM STATE AND FEDERAL ANTI-DISCRIMINATION LAWS FOR RELIGIOUS SCHOOL TEACHERS

Published on: July 17, 2020 | by Mashel Law, L.L.C.

On July 8, 2020, the United States Supreme Court narrowed employment protections from state and federal anti-discrimination laws for religious schoolteachers. In Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru, No. 19-267, the Court held that the First Amendment’s religion clauses foreclose courts from hearing employment-discrimination claims from teachers at religious schools who have at least some role in teaching the faith.

In 2012, the Supreme Court ruled, in Hosanna-Tabor Church v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 565 U.S. 171 (2012), that the “ministerial exception,” which bars ministers from suing churches and other religious institutions for employment discrimination, prohibited a lawsuit filed by a teacher at a Lutheran school who was also an ordained minister. By a vote of 7-2, the Court held that the exception also forecloses lawsuits by two teachers at Catholic elementary schools in southern California. Although the teachers were not ordained ministers, the schools had argued that the exception nonetheless applied because they played a key role in teaching religion to their students, and the Court – in an opinion by Justice Samuel Alito – agreed.

The decision came in a pair of cases, against parish schools in the Los Angeles area. Agnes Morrissey-Berru taught at Our Lady of Guadalupe School in Hermosa Beach for nearly two decades before she was told that her contract would not be renewed. Morrissey-Berru went to federal court, where she claimed that she had been the victim of age discrimination. The district court threw out the lawsuit, agreeing with the school that the ministerial exception applied. The second plaintiff, Kristen Biel, sued St. James School in Torrance when – not long after she disclosed that she was being treated for breast cancer – the school failed to renew her contract. Biel claimed that the school had discriminated against her because she had cancer, but the district court agreed with the school that Biel’s lawsuit was barred by the ministerial exception. The United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit reinstated both teachers’ lawsuits. It reasoned that the ministerial exception normally applies when an employee plays a “religious leadership” role, but that Biel and Morrissey-Berru played a more limited role, mostly “teaching religion from a book.” The schools went to the Supreme Court, which reversed.

THE NEED TO RECOGNIZE AND DEAL WITH UNCONSCIOUS RACIAL BIAS

Published on: July 2, 2020 | by Mashel Law, L.L.C.

One cannot fix what is not recognized to exist, nor fix

which is not understood to be broken.

Assimilation for Black Americans is near impossible. Skin color cannot be escaped and keeping quiet does not hide racial identity. The blackness of an African American’s skin makes their basic human and constitutional right to be treated with equanimity and fairness dependent on how white Americans choose to treat them, consciously or unconsciously.

THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT EXTENDS WORKPLACE DISCRIMINATION PROTECTIONS TO THE LGBTQ COMMUNITY

Published on: June 19, 2020 | by Mashel Law, L.L.C.

When Donald J. Trump was elected president in 2016, gay and lesbian leaders feared their far-reaching civil rights victories of recent years would be in peril because of the imminent arrival of scores of conservative judges and full Republican control of the federal government. But on Monday, June 15, 2020, Trump appointee Justice Neil Gorsuch authored an historic 6-3 majority opinion by the Supreme Court of the United States providing nationwide protections for the LGBTQ community against workplace discrimination. In Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia 2020 WL 3146686, Justice Gorsuch wrote, “In Title VII, Congress adopted broad language making it illegal for an employer to rely on an employee’s sex when deciding to fire that employee. *** We do not hesitate to recognize today a necessary consequence of that legislative choice: An employer who fires an individual merely for being gay or transgender defies the law.” Prior to Bostock, it was legal in more than half of the states of our country to fire or not hire workers for being gay, bisexual, or transgender.

The decision in Bostock covering three cases was the Court’s first on LGBTQ rights since the retirement in 2018 of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinions in all four of the court’s major gay rights decisions including the seminal case of Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 135 (2015) legalizing gay marriage in the country. The first of these cases concerned a pair of lawsuits from gay men who said they were fired because of their sexual orientation: Bostock and Altitude Express Inc. v. Zarda, No. 17-1623. The third was a gender identity case entitled R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, No. 18-107. R.G. & G.R., was brought by a transgender woman named Aimee Stephens who was fired from a Michigan funeral home after making it known in 2013 that she was a transgender woman and would start working in women’s clothing. When describing the 3 cases, Justice Gorsuch wrote, “Few facts are needed to appreciate the legal question we face. Each of the three cases before us started the same way: An employer fired a long-time employee shortly after the employee revealed that he or she is homosexual or transgender—and allegedly for no reason other than the employee’s homosexuality or transgender status.”

Justice Gorsuch began his opinion in Bostock by explaining that the Supreme Court generally interprets a law by looking at how the public would have understood the law when it was passed — “the ordinary public meaning” of the law. Here, he reasoned, the word “sex” means either male or female. Under the plain terms of Title VII, then, an employer violates Title VII “when it intentionally fires an individual employee based in part on sex,” even if “other factors besides the plaintiff’s sex contributed to the decision” and even if “the employer treated women as a group the same when compared to men as a group.” Justice Gorsuch stressed that what matters is whether “changing the employee’s sex would have yielded a different choice by the employer.” Discrimination against LGBTQ employees, Justice Gorsuch and the rest of the majority made clear, “necessarily entails discrimination based on sex; the first cannot happen without the second.”

NEW JERSEY WORKERS CAN RECOVER WAGES FOR SIX YEARS OF UNEQUAL DISCRIMINATORY PAY

Published on: June 2, 2020 | by Mashel Law, L.L.C.

By passing and signing into law the New Jersey Equal Pay Act (EPA), our state legislature and Governor Murphy made clear that unequal pay practices based on a person’s gender, race, national origin, disability or other protected class characteristic, for employees performing same or similar work, will not be tolerated in New Jersey. A powerful remedy found in the EPA allows an aggrieved employee to seek back pay damages for discriminatory pay practices going back 6-years!

The passage of the EPA meant that the statute of limitations for claims based on discriminatory pay was expanded from 2-years under the existing New Jersey Law Against Discrimination (NJLAD) to a period of 6-years. Specifically, this look-back provision of the EPA found at N.J.S.A. 10:5-12A, , states that, “…liability shall accrue and an aggrieved person may obtain relief for back pay for the entire period of time, except not more than six years, in which the violation with regard to discrimination in compensation or in the financial terms or conditions of employment has been continuous, if the violation continues to occur within the statute of limitations…” (emphasis added).

A plain reading of the EPA makes clear that a victimized employee is permitted to recover damages for 6-years of unequal pay so long as it is shown to the satisfaction of a court that the complained of unequal pay practices continued to take place one or more times after the EPA took effect on July 1, 2018. Despite the apparent clarity of the EPA, some employers sought to challenge this 6-year claw back period arguing that by giving effect to the 6-year statute of limitation as of its effective date would mean the law was being given a manifestly unfair retrospective application. Retrospective application of a new law or rule depends on whether there has been a departure from existing law. State v. G.E.P., 458 N.J. Super. 436, 444-445 (App. Div. 2019). If there is a departure from exiting a law, the new law or rule is only given prospective effect. Id. A new rule or law exists if “‘it breaks new ground or imposes a new obligation …. [or] if the result was not dictated by precedent existing at the time the defendant’s conviction became final.'” Id. quoting State v. Lark, 117 N.J. 331, 339 (1989) (quoting Teague v. Lane, 489 U.S. 288, 301 (1989)).

FURLOUGHED NEW JERSEY WORKERS MAY BE ABLE TO CONTINUE TO RECEIVE UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS IF THEY REFUSE AN OFFER OF EMPLOYMENT OR REEMPLOYMENT WHICH COMES WITH A SUBSTANTIAL WAGE REDUCTION

Published on: May 11, 2020 | by Mashel Law, L.L.C.

The unemployment rate in the United States has soared to 14.7%, the highest since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and is expected to continue to increase. In just the past few weeks alone, more than 1 million people have filed unemployment claims in New Jersey. In response to this pandemic caused economic crisis, the United States Congress created the Payroll Protection Program (PPP), a loan program originating from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act. PPP is designed to provide a direct incentive for small businesses to keep their employees on payroll. Under PPP, loans granted by the Small Business Administration (SBA) to businesses will be forgiven if all employees are kept on the payroll for eight weeks and the money is used for payroll, rent, mortgage interest, or utilities.

More specifically, PPP requires the employer to pay out at least 75% of the monies loaned in payroll. Because of this, many employers believe they can recall furloughed employees back to work at only 75% of the employees’ prior wage. This is very pleasant news for workers who while on unemployment have been receiving supplemental CARES Act unemployment insurance stimulus monies of $600.00 per week together with traditional unemployment insurance benefits. The maximum unemployment insurance benefit rate in New Jersey is currently $713.00 per week. This means many in New Jersey are collecting $1,313.00 per week (this comes to a yearly wage rate of $68,276) while home on unemployment. It is fair to state that this is likely more money than many of these workers have ever earned in wages during their adult life. Against this backdrop, consider the reaction of these same unemployed workers when notified they must return to work and accept a 25% pay cut because their employer who just received their PPP loan monies has no financial means other than the PPP loan to make payroll. Consequently, many furloughed employees called back to work face the ugly prospect of not only having to give up their traditional unemployment insurance benefits plus the $600 in weekly stimulus monies they’ve been receiving, but also must now endure a 25% cut in pay upon returning to work. Such a horrifying turn of events would leave an affected New Jersey worker to wonder whether they can refuse to return to work under such circumstance and continue to receive his/her unemployment benefits. As is often the case, the answer depends on the controlling facts.

Generally, an individual will be disqualified from benefits if he or she fails to accept suitable work. N.J.A.C. 12:17-11.5(a). However, suitability of work in terms of wages means 80% of the individual’s average weekly wage, including the value of the individual’s benefits, during the base year of pay. Id. Moreover, no work may be deemed suitable, and an individual will not be disqualified for benefits because of his or her refusal to accept work if the wages, hours, or other conditions of work offered are substantially less favorable than those prevailing for similar work in the labor market area. N.J.A.C. 12:17-11.5(b).