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Tag: settlement

My EEOC Charge is 1 in 90,000 – EEOC Fiscal Year 2018 Enforcement and Litigation Data

April 18, 2019

On April 10, 2019, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) released detailed breakdowns of its work in fiscal year 2018 which ended on September 30, 2018. You can find details on its website but some remarkable statistics are as follows:

  • Received 76,418 charges of workplace discrimination

  • Resolved 90,558 charges of discrimination (including those filed in prior years)

  • Secured $505 million for victims in private sector, state and local government, and federal workplaces

  • Handled over 519,000 calls to its toll-free number, 34,600 emails and more than 200,000 inquiries in field offices

  • Filed 199 merits lawsuits alleging discrimination, including 117 individual suits and 45 suits involving multiple victims or discrimin­atory policies and 37 systemic discrimination cases

  • Achieved a successful outcome in 95.7 percent of all district court resolutions

Often, people inquire whether the #MeToo movement spurred more legal disputes. EEOC data demonstrates this was indeed the case. The agency also received 7,609 sexual harassment charges – a 13.6 percent increase from FY 2017 – and obtained $56.6 million in monetary benefits for victims of sexual harassment.

However, leading the pack as the most frequently alleged basis of discrimination with 51.6% of all charges filed, was “retaliation”, followed by “sex”, then “disability” then “race”, then “age”.

5 Reasons Why Employers Settle Unpaid Overtime Claims

July 2, 2018

The Federal Labor Standards Act is very clear: all employees must be paid at least minimum wage for every hour worked and overtime pay for every hour worked over forty hours in a week. Unfortunately, even when employers do their absolute best to comply, compliance checks and balances fail, delegation to third party payroll processors fail, technology fail or human errors abound. If an employer find’s itself in this situations there are good reasons to settle the claim. Some of these are as follows:

  1. You made a mistake – such as deducting lunchtime from the number of hours worked per week even though you do not permit the employee to take a lunch break or the employee cannot halt work to take a lunch break, or failing to keep adequate time records in the first place
  2. A class action is no joke – should there be more than a few employees claiming unpaid overtime, whether their allegations are valid or not, the cost of defending such a suit would be enormous and if they’re successful, the costs of back pay and penalties can also be crippling
  3. Treble damages – this is legal speak for if found to be liable, you’ll pay double the unpaid wages owed. Hence if you’ve made a mistake (see reason number one above) – settlement for the amount owed without treble damages makes sense
  4. Attorneys Fees – the law provides for automatic entitlement to reimbursement for attorneys fees for all successful plaintiffs in such lawsuits, thus, if found to be liable you’ll pay double the unpaid wages owed, treble damages and attorneys fees incurred by the plaintiff (or plaintiffs – see number two above)
  5. Unwelcome visitors from the Department of Labor – the DOL will not launch a full investigation for an isolated case of unpaid overtime, trust me, I’ve tried to get them to do it; however if the employees can muster any semblance of a class or if you business has been reported systemically, expect a visit from some unwelcome visitors

Myths In Employment Civil Rights Litigation: Odds

March 30, 2018

Myth 6. Plaintiffs have high odds of success and win large awards.

Although media coverage gives that impression, we find that some 36 percent of plaintiffs have their cases dismissed or thrown out on a motion for summary judgment and 50 percent of plaintiffs receive settlements early on, with an average settlement of $30,000. Of those cases that go to trial (6 percent), only one-third end with a win for the plaintiff.

More significantly, we find that plaintiffs often pay a high personal cost for their involvement in discrimination lawsuits. Beginning in the workplace, once they start to raise the possibility that they were discriminated against and certainly if they file a charge, they face ostracism from management and even co-workers…

SOURCE: http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/myths_show_the_harsh_realities_of_civil_rights_litigation/P1