Bay Area Employment Lawyer Blog

Sometimes courts raise the bar on sexual harassment claims too high. Whether the sexual harasser’s conduct is “severe” or “pervasive” enough to go to trial often seems to be determined by the subjective lenses of the judges. The judges’ lenses are often colored by their own life experience. Certainly whether a judge is a “he”…

The best that can be said about Smith v. Clark County School District (9th Cir 2013) 727 F.3d 950, as well as all the case law examining whether what an employee said on his or her disability application bars a claim for disability discrimination/failure to accommodate, is: BE CAREFUL! Anything you say can and will…

The law is pretty well settled that a labor arbitration does not generally bar a unionized employee from bringing a claim under the Fair Employment and Housing Act, such as a discrimination, sexual harassment or retaliation claim. See Alexander v. Gardner-Denver (1974) 415 U.S. 36; Camargo v. California Portland Cement Co. (2001) 86 Cal.App.4th 995.…

The tension between an employee’s simple right to receive his wages for work he performed and the U.S. Supreme Court’s favoritism towards employers, is almost palpable in the tortured history of Sonic-Calabasas A, Inc. v. Moreno (Sonic II) ___ Ca.4th ___ (Oct. 17, 2013). Here the employer imposed an arbitration agreement upon Mr. Moreno. When…

Reading arbitration cases is like walking through a muddy field on a dark and rainy night. What is okay in the context of one case, is not in the context of another case. It just depends on how much you slip and slide through the mud and where exactly you fall. Take the recent case…

Proving discrimination cases by the standard of a “substantial motivating factor” is now clearly the law of the land – at least in the land of California. Let’s look at why this is so, and what it means. First, in May 2013, the California Supreme Court declared that the standard of “substantial motivating factor” would…

Dr. Naiel Nassar was employed by the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center as a faculty member and staff physician. Dr. Nassar, who is of Middle Eastern descent and practices Islam, claimed that one of his supervisors was biased against him on account of his ethnic heritage and religion. As a result, he resigned his…

On June 24, 2013, the United States Supreme Court issued two rulings that were met with a roar of approval from equal rights advocates from coast to coast. Just days before the annual LGBT pride celebrations got underway nationwide, the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act (“DOMA”), and issued another decision which…

Under both California law and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, your employer may be liable if you are harassed by either a co-worker or a supervisor. However, it is more difficult to hold an employer liable for harassment if the harasser is a co-worker, and easier if the harasser is a…

Most of us in California are familiar with California Redemption Value, or CRV, that we pay when we purchase a beverage from a retailer. If you take your empty bottles and cans to a recycling center, you can get a CRV refund, which is normally determined by the weight of the recyclables you bring in.…