The “Human Resources” or “HR” department of an organization typically performs various employee management functions, such as overseeing compliance with labor law and employment standards, administration of employee benefits, organizing employee files with documents for future reference, recruitment, and employee onboarding and offboarding.  At their best, HR departments provide critical support to both employers and […]

These are extraordinary times for the healthcare system in the United States.  As of this writing, at least 206,233 Americans are known to have been infected with the coronavirus, and at least 4,576 of those individuals have died.  Of the Americans who have tested positive for the virus, at least 83,887 are from New York, […]

Retaliation can rear its ugly head in a variety of contexts, including after employees separate from their employers. Fortunately, several anti-retaliation laws protect former employees who experience post-employment retaliation for complaining about discrimination. In two critical retaliation cases analyzing the breadth of Title VII’s protections—Robinson v. Shell Oil Company and Burlington Northern & Santa Fe […]

As of October 9, 2018, New York State employers are now required to provide sexual harassment training pursuant to the State’s recently enacted sexual harassment prevention legislation, Section 201-g of the New York State Labor Law. This new law requires that all employers within New York, both private and public, provide annual anti-harassment training to […]

“We need not leave our common sense at the doorstep when we interpret a statute,” wrote a four-Justice plurality of the Supreme Court in Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, 490 U.S. 228, 241 (1989), the seminal ruling that gender stereotyping by an employer is actionable as sex discrimination under Title VII. And yet, nearly three decades […]

Until recently, employees in New York City who wanted to file a sexual orientation discrimination case against their employer could sue under state law and the New York City Human Rights Law, but not federal law. On February 26, 2018 this changed with Zarda v. Altitude Express, Inc., —F.3d—(2d Cir. 2018). Today, in New York, […]