Delaware Employment Law Blog

Pregnancy Discrimination is back in the news, courtesy of the U.S. Supreme Court's grant of certiorari in the case of AT&T v. Hulteen, No. 07-543.  Employees who took maternity leave, pursuant to the company's decades-old policy, were not given the same credit towards their pension as employees who took other kinds of disability leave.

The Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA) was not enacted until 1979 and, since then, AT&T’s maternity leave has been credited toward retirement, in compliance with the law. At issue is whether AT&T must now give female retirees credit for maternity leave taken from 1968-1976, preceding enactment of the PDA.

The Ninth Circuit held that the benefits system violated the PDA.  AT&T appealed and the Solicitor General recommended that cert be granted.  The SCOTUS Blog covers AT&T v. Hulteen and provides more details as well as links to the previous filings.

A ruling against AT&T would seem to be contrary to the Court’s recent ruling in Ledbetter v. Goodyear, related to the timeliness of discrimination claims whose effects may not be apparent for many years later. Further, it is generally held that statutes are not retroactive absent statutory language otherwise. In light of these precedents, a ruling in favor of the employees in this case may signal a real interest in this type of discrimination. Stay tuned!

The United States Supreme Court is anything but anti-employee.  The Supreme Court's decisions in Cracker Barrel and Gomez-Perez, filed yesterday, continue to broaden the limits of Section 1981 in favor of employees.

Recently, employee-advocate groups have made great sport out of attacking the Supreme Court’s employment-discrimination decisions--using them to raise the hue and cry for legislative reform. This week's rulings in CBOCS West, Inc v. Humphries (the “Cracker Barrel” case), and Gomez-Perez v. Potter show that employee advocates and plaintiffs’ lawyers have little to complain about.

The Background of Section 1981

The Court's 7-to-2 ruling in the Cracker Barrel case addressed a novel question of law: Whether there can be a claim of unlawful retaliation based on Section 1981. Section 1983, originally known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, was passed in 1871 during Reconstruction following the civil war.  The law was intended to provide a federal remedy for private conspiracies such as those being committed by the KKK, which the Southern state courts had been unsuccessful in prosecuting. In short, the law prohibits discrimination based on race in all aspects of contractual relationships, including written and unwritten employment contracts.

But Section 1981 contains no anti-retaliation language at all. What’s more, when Congress amended the law in 1991, it did not add an anti-retaliation provision.  By that time, many other anti-discrimination statutes had been enacted to explicitly included anti-relation provisions. Nevertheless, in yesterday's Supreme Court opinion by Justice Breyer, the Court concluded that retaliation claims may brought under the statute and are “well embedded in the law.”

The Significance of the Cracker Barrel Decision

The ruling is significant in at least two ways. First, unlike the perhaps more familiar racial discrimination claim under Title VII, damage awards under Section 1981 do not include monetary caps. Employers are therefore exposed to substantially higher damage claims.

Second, Section 1981 claims do not require an administrative filing with the EEOC. The statute of limitations for such claims is much longer for these claims as compared to Title VII.  The statute of limitations in a Section 1981 claim is borrowed from state law.  The limitations period from the analogous intentional tort claim is applied unless the limitations periods vary for different intentional torts.  In that case, the state's general personal injury statute of limitations should apply.

For Delaware employers, that means that, whereas a Title VII employee-plaintiff has 300 days to file a Charge of Discrimination, a Section 1981 plaintiff has more than twice as long, four years, to file a complaint in federal court. Further, since no administrative filing requirement exists under Section 1981, the employer may be unaware of a potential claim for a lengthy period of time.

The Significance of the Gomez Ruling

The Gomez decision is less significant in that it only applies to federal employees. In Gomez, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 6 to 3 ruling, found that a cause of action for retaliation existed for claims brought pursuant to the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (“ADEA”). The ADEA has an explicit anti-retaliation provision applicable to private sector employees but no anti-retaliation provision applicable to federal workers. The High Court, nevertheless, concluded that Congress “intended” that retaliation be considered another form of “intentional discrimination” under the law.

Cracker Barrel and Gomez continue the Supreme Court trend that began with the Burlington and Faragher decisions, issued in 1998.  Since those rulings, the Court has taken an expansive view of anti-retaliation claims.  It will be interesting to see whether pro-employee groups and Plaintiffs' lawyers will be satisfied by these decisions in light of the decidedly expansive view of employee-retaliation rights that the Court has adopted.

Additional Resources:

The Legal Information Institute (LII) at Cornell has an excellent summary of the Cracker Barrel decision, as well as links to the actual decision and the numerous briefs.  The Gomez decision is also posted at the LII website.

HR Hero is an excellent resource for more information on the broader topics that were addressed in these cases, including Section 1981, Employment Retaliation, and Age Discrimination in Employment (ADEA).

[Update May 29, 2008:  SCOTUS Blog also has an in-depth analysis of both cases from the plaintiff-employee perspective.]

Yesterday four members of the Supreme Court had to recuse themselves from a case, and as a result, no decision could be made. Apparently the Justices have not heard of the “rule of necessity.” That rule of thumb says, in essence, that if a court is unable to decide a case because the justices have conflicts, it is more equitable to have a judge with a conflict rule on the case, rather than leaving it undecided. A Supreme Court Justice should be able to render an objective decision even though he or she has some stock in one of the litigants. While not the optimum situation, that is far preferable to saying to the adversaries that the lower court decision is unreviewable.

On Wednesday, the US Supreme Court decided the question, "When Is a Charge a Charge?" According to the Supreme Court's decision in Federal Express v. Holowecki, the answer may leave some employers wanting for more.

Current and former FedEx employees filed an "intake questionnaire" withthe Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), alleging that they had been subject to unlawful discrimination based on their ages. The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), requires an employee to exhaust her remedies at the administrative level, either with the EEOC or the local state agency, before she can proceed with a civil lawsuit.

The administrative process begins with the complainant going to the EEOC or state agency and completing a Charge of Discrimination. A "Charge" form is a simple, one-page form designed to capture only the most basic information about the allegations; i.e., employer's name and address, number of employees, protected class asserted, adverse action, and a brief narrative.

Here, the plaintiffs filed an "intake questionnaire," instead of a Charge. The former is a "fill-in-the-blank" question and answer form that the complainant would normally fill out after her initial intake interview and Charge are completed.

The EEOC says that a filing will be considered a Charge, "so long as it reasonably be construed to request agency action and appropriate relief on the employee's behalf." The EEOC failed to notify FedEx about the allegations--meaning that FedEx had no opportunity to respond to the claims before being sued. The Court held that the plaintiff should not be penalized for the EEOC's mistake:

The Federal Government interacts with individual citizens through all but countless forms, schedules, manuals, and worksheets. Congress, in most cases, delegates the format and design of these instruments to the agencies that administer the relevant laws and processes. An assumption underlying the congressional decision to delegate rulemaking and enforcement authority to the agency, and the consequent judicial rule of deference to the agency's determinations, is that the agency will take all efforts to ensure that affected parties will receive the full benefits and protections of the law. Here, because the agency failed to treat respondent's filing as a charge in the first instance, both sides lost the benefits of the ADEA's informal dispute resolution process.

The employer's interests, in particular, were given short shrift, for it was not notified of respondent's complaint until she filed suit. The court that hears the merits of this litigation can attempt to remedy this deficiency by staying the proceedings to allow an opportunity for conciliation and settlement. True, that remedy would be imperfect. Once the adversary process has begun a dispute may be in a more rigid cast than if conciliation had been attempted at the outset.

This result is unfortunate, but, at least in this case, unavoidable. While courts will use their powers to fashion the best relief possible in situations like this one, the ultimate responsibility for establishing a clearer, more consistent process lies with the agency. The agency already has made some changes to the charge-filing process. ... To reduce the risk of further misunderstandings by those who seek its assistance, the agency should determine, in the first instance, what additional revisions in its forms and processes are necessary or appropriate.

This decision is disappointing, though not necessarily surprising. The courts are always hesitant to dismiss a plaintiff's claim because of a procedural defect--especially when that defect was not caused by the plaintiff. Despite the sense of unfairness to the employer that results from this case, the Court's decision did contain one small trinket of employer victory. In it's opinion, the Court scolded the Commission to get its act together by evaluating its internal processes in an effort to avoid this sort of beaurocratic oversight again in the future. A small victory for sure. Read the full text of the Court's decision here.