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Ruling Aids Employees Who File Complaints

WASHINGTON—A recent Supreme Court ruling is designed to protect employees from retaliation after a discrimination complaint is lodged.
By decisions of 7 to 2 in one case and 6 to 3 in the other, the court seeks to protect employees from retaliation even though Congress did not explicitly say so in defining workers’ rights under two civil rights laws.
    One of the cases began as a lawsuit by a clerk for the United States Postal Service in Puerto Rico. The plaintiff, Myrna Gomez-Perez, 45, at the time, complained that she had been denied a transfer to a different office because of age discrimination. Her lawsuit alleged that as a result of her complaint, she became the target of retaliatory actions by her supervisors.
    Although her suit, was dismissed by the lower court in Boston which has jurisdiction over Puerto Rico’s federal cases, this new ruling reinstates her lawsuit.
    The other case was brought by a former assistant manager of a Cracker Barrel restaurant, a black man named Hedrick G. Humphries. He had complained that a white assistant manager had been motivated by racial discrimination in dismissing a black employee. In his lawsuit, Humphries claimed that he then lost his own job in retaliation for his complaint.
    The number of retaliation complaint filings doubled in the last 15 years to 22,000 from 11,000, even though Congress has provided explicit protection against retaliation in two major laws,.

Posted June 4, 2008

    One law is the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race and sex. The other is the provision of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act that applies in the private sector.
    However, the age-discrimination law does not provide explicit protection against age-discrimination to federal government workers. Nor is there explicit language in a post-Civil War-era statute that gives “all person” the same right “as is enjoyed by white citizens” when it comes to making and enforcing contracts, such as contracts of employment. Those were the two statutes that the court recently interpreted.
    In both decisions, the majority relied heavily on precedent, using recent cases with retaliation claims to craft the new ruling.
    The most recent such case was a ruling issued in 2005. It held then that a law known as title IX, which bars sex discrimination in schools and colleges that receive federal money, also prohibits school officials from retaliating against those who bring sex-discrimination complaints. The statute itself does not mention retaliation.

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