Jersey City Workplace Discrimination Lawyers

Types of Workplace Discrimination in Jersey City

Civil rights laws prohibit discrimination in the workplace. Workplace discrimination cases fall into three broad types:

Denying Equal Opportunities

Employers cannot take any action that affects the conditions or benefits of employment based on prohibited classifications. Some actions that an employer cannot perform in a discriminatory way include the following:

• Hiring
• Firing and laying off
• Training
• Promoting
• Increasing pay
• Providing fringe benefits like insurance
• Assigning tasks

Your employer can be liable for this type of discrimination regardless of their intent. It doesn’t matter if they discriminate because they favored one group or disfavored a different group. The only relevant fact is that one group was favored over the other group, that the groups were defined based on a prohibited classification, and that actions were taken against you because you belonged to one of the groups.

For example, suppose that you are a black salesperson for a pharmaceutical company. Your employer sends all the white salespeople, including those with less experience than you, to sales training. The employer denies your promotion because you have not completed the training course.

Your employer’s reasons for taking these steps are irrelevant. The relevant fact is that your job situation has fewer opportunities and that the only reason for this difference is your race.

Creating a Hostile Work Environment

The second form of discrimination happens when your employer creates a hostile work environment. This means you are subjected to such intense and pervasive abuse, bullying, harassment, or retaliation that it becomes a condition of your employment.

To prove workplace discrimination, we must prove that you were targeted for hostility due to your membership in a protected class. We must also show that the hostility went beyond a few comments or jokes. Most critically, we must show that your employer created the environment or did nothing to stop it after learning of it.

For example, suppose that one shift supervisor always writes up Spanish-speaking workers for violations and bullies them by calling them names and taping racist memes on their locker doors.

If no one reports the actions, the employer might claim that the supervisor went rogue. But if someone reports them and the employer does nothing to correct the problems, the employer might have contributed to the hostile work environment due to inaction.

A term you may hear in hostile work environment cases is “quid pro quo.” Although quid pro quo might contribute to a hostile work environment, you do not necessarily need to experience quid pro quo to have a discrimination case.

For example, in a classic sexual harassment case, the harasser might threaten to derail the target’s career if they do not agree to a dating or sexual relationship. This “something for something” trade is meant to pressure the employee using fear.

Since it is based on the employee’s sex, the law prohibits this type of quid pro quo.

But quid pro quo is only one type of hostility that qualifies as discrimination. Pervasive sexual harassment, by itself, would be enough to create a hostile work environment without any quid pro quo or the threat of it.

Retaliation

The third type of claim involves retaliation. In this type of claim, the employee doesn’t experience discrimination based on their race, sex, or other immutable characteristic. Instead, the employer discriminates against the employee for helping another worker’s discrimination claim.

For example, an employer might fire a male employee who testified in support of a female employee’s sexual harassment case.

Understanding Employer or Workplace Discrimination

To understand employer and workplace discrimination, you need to go back to the reason for civil rights laws. Equality in America means equal opportunity. The laws don’t promise success to anyone. Instead, they promise that everyone will have the same opportunities to succeed, and if they make the most of them, they can succeed just like anyone else.

New Jersey law goes even further than federal law in ensuring a level playing field. In addition to race, color, national origin, sex, age, religion, and disability, employers in the state also cannot discriminate based on:

• Creed
• Nationality
• Ancestry
• Familial status
• Marital/civil union status
• Domestic partnership status
• Atypical hereditary cellular or blood trait
• Gender identity and expression
• Genetic information
• Liability for military service
• AIDS and HIV status

Importantly, your Jersey City workplace discrimination lawyer doesn’t need to prove animus to win your case. Workplace discrimination is not about hatred, dislike, or distaste for a particular group. It’s about the unequal treatment of that group. From the viewpoint of the law, holding down one group or promoting a different group produces the same result. The goal of both New Jersey and U.S. employment discrimination laws is to give everyone an equal opportunity to succeed in a genuinely unbiased way.