Earlier this month, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) issued new Enforcement Guidance on Pregnancy Discrimination and Related Issues which discusses legal requirements under the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA), Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and other federal laws. According to the new Enforcement Guidance, pregnancy discrimination complaints have been…
The Maine Employee Rights Group (MERG) has filed a lawsuit against Huhtamaki, Inc. The lawsuit alleges that the company discriminated against MERG’s client Barry Kot because he has epilepsy and retaliated against him because he spoke out against the company’s discrimination. Huhtamaki is a large Finnish corporation with about 14,400 employees…
Meggan Sommerville, a manager in Hobby Lobby’s Aurora, Illinois store, has filed a lawsuit against Hobby Lobby for gender identity discrimination because she claims that it will not permit her to use the women’s restroom. For years, she says that her boss has insisted that she cannot use the women’s…
The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) and a private law firm represent Ruben Juarez in a first-of-a-kind lawsuit against Northwestern Mutual, an insurance company. Mr. Juarez was brought to the United States illegally as a child. However, he has a work permit, a social security number, and…
Fifty years ago, in July 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law. Through this landmark piece of legislation, the federal government sought, among other things, to dismantle abhorrent “Jim Crow” laws in the South which rendered African Americans second class citizens. A strong minority…
The astonishing answer to this question is, sometimes, yes; an employer can sometimes get away with firing an employee for reporting unlawful activity if that employee’s job duties required him to report the unlawful activity. In Winslow v. Aroostook County, the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals interpreted one section…
A group of sociologists recently conducted experiments in New England and the Southern United States to determine whether the inclusion of a religious identifier on a resume affected an applicant’s chances of getting hired. The sociologists found that applicants who included a religious identifier on their resumes decreased their chances…
Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) has proposed legislation, supported by a group of trucking and business organizations, that would freeze some new federal regulations designed to address the problem of truckers driving without enough sleep. Collins believes that these regulations need to be frozen and studied more because she thinks they…
Last week, the City of Houston, Texas, passed an ordinance that prohibits employers from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. Houston is the fourth largest city in the nation, with a population much larger than the entire state of Maine. Under Texas state law and federal…
The U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals considered this question earlier this month in Bacon et al. v. Eaton Corp. et al. The Bacon case involved shift supervisors who claimed that they did not receive overtime pay when they worked more than 40 hours per week. Under the federal Fair…