Access To Justice

Just over a year ago, President Barack Obama signed his first major piece of legislation. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act  overturned a controversial 2007 Supreme Court case, and made it easier for women who faced wage discrimination to sue their employers.

Here is what I said about Lilly Ledbetter at the time.

Basically, the Ledbetter Act revised the statute of limitations (SOL) for filing discrimination claims with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), so that each discriminatory paycheck essentially restarted the SOL clock for plaintiffs.

According to a recent article over at Law 360, here’s what that means for working women: 

“People challenging a wide variety of practices that resulted in discriminatory compensation are benefiting from the act’s passage,” EEOC said. “These practices include determining base pay or wages, deciding job classifications, denying career ladder or other noncompetitive promotions, denying tenure, and failing to respond to requests for raises.”

All told, during the past year, EEOC received more than 68,000 complaints of workplace discrimination, including 4,800 charges of wage discrimination, 1,900 of which were filed by women alleging sex discrimination in compensation.  Some of those women, depending on when they filed, may not have gotten their day in court if not for the Lilly Ledbetter Act.

The bottom line is this:  The Ledbetter Act is the latest part of a federal regime that prohibits employers from discriminating against employees based on gender.  We can expect to see more and more claims filed under its provisions.

If you or someone you know has been the victim of workplace discrimination, you should know your legal rights.

If you have a loved one who is sick, or a child who needs you to be home to care for them, you might think that you’re rights are protected by the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA).   But it turns out that the FMLA which is supposed to protect workers is violated all the time by employers seeking to skirt its requirements.

In fact, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, in one year alone, they received 1,983 complaints of employees treated unfairly under the FMLA. Of those, 1,087 were found to be true violations resulting in $1.5 million in back wages for the workers. The primary violation found was that people who tried to take leave for family reasons were wrongfully terminated.

At Sokolove Law, our mission is to provide access to the civil justice system and help those who have been harmed to exercise their legal rights.  These are the people we’re talking about—someone  who loses their job simply because their employer refuses to grant them leave to care for a sick family member, or support a pregnant spouse.

The good news is that the FMLA is pretty clear cut.

The FMLA permits eligible employees to take up to a total of 12 work weeks of unpaid leave during any 12 month period for one or more of the following reasons:

• Birth and care of a newborn child of the employee
• Placement with the employee of a child for adoption or foster care
• Care of a spouse, child or parent with a serious health condition
• Serious health condition of the employee

In January 2009, the FMLA was amended to include employees who take a leave because of any qualifying exigency relating to the active duty or call to active duty of a spouse, child or parent.

Employers are required to continue to provide benefits and to reinstate the employee to their old job or an equivalent one when they return.

Unfortunately employers either don’t grant the leave, or fail to reinstate the employee. In the worst circumstances, they actually terminate the employee allegedly for “cause” which is very often not the case.

Employees who are wrongfully terminated have rights under the FMLA.  If you or someone you know thinks you’ve been the victim of a violation of this important law, please click here for more information or feel free to share your thoughts below.