Rojgar Job News

Back in the 1990s, employers still had the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings and the tawdry sexual harassment allegations relatively fresh on their minds. Employment lawyers will tell you that they started to see a bump up in claims in the early to mid 1990s as the issues of workplace harassment raised to the surface. I raised it in one of my posts 10 years ago this very week. But even before yesterday’s news that major movie mogul Harvey Weinstein has been accused of sexual harassment of many women over many years, I’d been thinking that we’re seeing another wave. For employers, this new era should be even more concerning. Why? Because back in the 1980s and early 1990s, employers could at least say that “well, we didn’t know we needed to train” or “well, we didn’t know we needed to do an investigation.”  It may not have been plausible (or even good business), but at least it was something. Now with laws in many states ma...

As part of my continuing series of posts about the CHRO, and following up from the 75th Anniversary panel discussion earlier this week, I wanted to provide an early look of the statistics that are soon to be released by the agency. I was provided a preliminary draft in preparation for the panel presentation; it should be out in the next week or two and I was asked not to divulge the specific numbers.  Stay tuned for my deep dive into the numbers when they are officially released. (As a refresher, you can see last year’s numbers here.) But there are few trends that are readily apparent from the draft. First, as we have all suspected, sexual harassment claims filed with the CHRO are up substantially over the prior year.  This is not too surprising given the publicity regarding the #metoo movement.  Still, we haven’t seen these types of numbers in nearly 15 years.  When the final numbers are released, expect a big increase in sexual harassment claims from FY...

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...

In preparation for a webinar I gave this week with my colleague Chris Engler (which, by the way, you can access here) I took a deeper dive into the statistics from the annual report released by the CHRO, in a followup to my initial report here. When you look at the numbers in a snapshot, it’s sometimes hard to see where things are going. But thankfully, the CHRO has nearly two decades’ worth of data to parse through. So, I thought it might be useful to go back a decade to the 2008-09 annual report and compare it with 2018-2019 to see if we can gain a larger perspective on both the work of the CHRO and where we are in the state of employment law. Overall, I was left with questions that don’t have easy answers. So, let’s go through a few of the data points; the reports are all pretty much written the same way, with the same categories used: Complaints filed by Region : Overall, all complaints (housing, employment etc) were up in FY 2019 to 2625 from 2001 ten y...