Rojgar Job News

The Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunity (CHRO) was sued yesterday by its longtime (and former) Regional Manager Pekah Wallace.  The federal lawsuit claims her employment termination was improper and provides a whole host of information about what has been going on behind the scenes at the agency. You can download the complaint here.   (As with all new lawsuits, my standard warning applies — these are allegations in a complaint, not a determination from a court.) I’ll leave it for others to opine on the merits of the case because my firm represents a number of clients before the agency. The allegations, however, show, at a minimum, that there was a great deal of friction going on at the agency for a number of years — even while the agency was investigating the outside complaints of employees against their own employers too. Ms. Wallace alleges violations of: Conn. Gen. Stat. Sec. 31-51q (applying the First Amendment to the workplace); F...

Earlier this month, the EEOC released its statistics regarding charges for 2018.  I love looking at these because there are certain trends that always pop out. (You can see some prior years here and here.) Here are five big takeaways that employers in Connecticut can learn from these numbers. Charges Continue to Go Down — a Lot.  For the seventh year in a row, the number of charges processed by the EEOC continued to go down.  In 2018, the EEOC handled 76,418 charges, a 9.3 percent drop from 2017.  This is down substantially from the high water mark in 2011 of 99,947 and the lowest total in general since 2006. But, Some Claims are Way Up.  Perhaps not surprisingly given the attention that continues to be paid to the #metoo movement, sexual harassment claims are up. In 2018, the EEOC received 7,609 sexual harassment charges — a 13.6 percent increase from 2017. Sex Harassment Claims are Also More Costly .  The EEOC received $56.6M in mo...

On January 23, 2019, we reported that the Supreme Court had agreed to review a decision from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, Ft. Bend County v. Davis, which would answer conclusively whether the pre-filing administrative exhaustion requirement is jurisdictional (meaning that failure to fully exhaust administrative remedies would bar litigation) or non-jurisdictional and thus subject to waiver. The Supreme Court issued its decision on June 3, 2019 and ruled that administrative exhaustion is non-jurisdictional and subject to waiver. In Ft. Bend County , Ms. Davis filed a charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) alleging sexual harassment and retaliation. While Ms. Davis’ charge was pending, she was fired, allegedly for going to a church event instead of working as scheduled on a Sunday. Ms. Davis never formally amended her EEOC charge to allege religious discrimination in addition to her other theories, but nonetheless sued on that basis (among others) afte...