Recent Employment Law Decisions

"Otto Cuban Jew muther f***er bastard get our message your family is not safe we will get you good Jew is a dead Jew say hi to your hore wife death to the jews heil hitler [swastika]."

Let's be clear about what we are dealing with here. What the threat lacked in spelling, it made up for in terror. It wasn't the first threat Otto May had received, either. For years, beginning in 2002 and ending in 2005, he endured harassment, with statements such as "Otto Cuban Jew fag die," scrawled on his toolbox, left on notes, or graffitied on the elevator wall. His cars were vandalized multiple times, his bike tire punctured, and at one point, a dead bird was dressed up in a toilet paper KKK outfit, with a pointy hat, and placed in a vise at his workstation.

Obviously, something had to be done. What did his Chrysler, his employer, do?

Terri Basden worked as a dispatcher for a company that transported workers from one train to another train. It doesn't sound terribly exciting, but heck, it's a paycheck.

In January 2008, she fell after having a dizzy spell at home. She was treated at an emergency room, where the news got worse: the treating physician detected signs of multiple sclerosis. She also missed work.

She missed work again on the following dates, with a physician's note provided after each absence:

Columbia College Chicago informed Suriya Smiley, a part-time instructor, that it would not ask her to teach further classes after a student complained that Smiley had singled him out in class because he is Jewish.

Smiley, who is of Palestinian and Lebanese descent, claims that the decision was based on her race or national origin. The district court disagreed, and granted summary judgment in favor of Columbia.

The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that decision this week.

People typically associate the American Red Cross with collecting donations and offering disaster relief. It's a do-gooder group.

On the flip side, there's Seventh Circuit Judge Richard Cudahy's description of the Red Cross as "a company charged with unilaterally changing conditions of employment in order to cripple a new union."

This week, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals stepped into a dispute between the Red Cross and the National Labor Relations Board with its own brand of disaster relief: instructions for an interim injunction.

The City of Momence, Illinois fired Steven Cromwell, a former police lieutenant, after an incident of alleged alcohol-related misconduct. He sued, arguing that his termination was procedurally inadequate under the Fourteenth Amendment Due Process Clause, because that’s what all the kids are doing these days.

Momence city regulations provide that probationary employees may be terminated at any time for any reason, but omit similar language when it comes to nonprobationary employees. Cromwell — a nonprobationary employee — believes that omission means that he has a contractual right to continued employment absent cause for termination.

A district court and the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed.

Age discrimination is heading back to the Supreme Court in the 2013 Term, and the challenge in question matriculated from the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.

Monday, the Supreme Court agreed to consider “whether state and local government employees may avoid the Federal Age Discrimination in Employment Act’s comprehensive remedial regime by bringing age discrimination claims directly under the Equal Protection Clause and 42 U.S.C. § 1983.”

The case, which the Seventh Circuit decided in August 2012, is Madigan v. Levin.

Toy Collins says her American Red Cross co-workers discriminated against her and harassed her. She filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2006. Red Cross employees say that Collins stirred tensions among her co-workers and was paranoid that people were out to get her. The charity fired Collins in 2007.

In the she-says, they-say battle surrounding Collins' unlawful retaliation claim, they win because she failed to demonstrate a causal connection between her complaint and her subsequent termination.

If an employee sues his employer for discrimination, and is subsequently terminated, he can tack on an unlawful retaliation claim. He may not win, but he’ll probably get a chance to make his case.

Let’s tweak that scenario. If an employee sues his employer for discrimination, leaves the company to start his own business, and later doesn’t get a chance to pitch a software idea to the former employer, he doesn’t then get to sue for retaliation.

That seems pretty obvious, right? At least the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals thinks it is.

A family-owned company in Indiana has won a temporary injunction against the Affordable Care Act's birth control mandate, Reuters reports.

In a split-panel decision, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals consolidated the case, Grote v. Sebelius, with its December decision in Korte v. Sebelius, and granted the Grote family's request to be exempted from the birth control mandate pending appeal.

For certain jobs, getting dressed for work is compensable. In such jobs, employers should place time clocks where employees can access them before changing into their work clothes.

Time clock placement, like real estate, is controlled by location, location, location.

Over the last five years, Kevin Kasten’s Fair Labor Standards Act lawsuit about time clock placement was also controlled by location: It bounced like a pinball between the district court, Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court. This week, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals sent Kasten’s suit back to the district court, concluding that the court should hear his unlawful retaliation claim.