Employment laws regulate relationships between businesses and their workers. There are also statutes that establish crucial legal protections for employees in certain scenarios. Federal laws protect the rights of workers to engage in certain conduct, including attempts to organize with one another to start a union.
Employees have the right to report unsafe work conditions, to demand appropriate compensation for services provided and to request certain accommodations from their employers. Unfortunately, businesses are not always eager to uphold the rights of individual employees. Instead, they might unfairly punish those who report misconduct or other issues in the workplace.
Employers can also take punitive actions against those who utilize their basic rights, such as requesting unpaid leave after the birth of a child. When an employer wrongfully punishes a worker for engaging and protected activities, they and/or the company that employs the worker more broadly may have retaliated against the worker.
Retaliation comes in many different forms
The most overt form of employer retaliation involves the loss of employment due to protected workplace activities. If a company fires an employee for reporting harassment or requesting leave while dealing with a medical issue, then the worker may have reason to accuse the employer of unfairly retaliating.
Other times, retaliation is more subtle than summary termination. A supervisor responding to complaints of harassment might move the person who complained about harassment to a different department or a different shift. Their actions might effectively penalize the person who reported the misconduct instead of the person violating the rights of others.
Any adjustments to a worker’s employment arrangement that are negative could constitute retaliation. Transfers to different shifts, moves to other facilities and demotions are among the retaliatory actions that could follow a worker using their rights or filing a report. Some retaliation is even more subtle than that.
Employers may start enforcing rules with one worker that they do not enforce with others as a way to justify termination or other punitive actions in the future. For example, a worker who has long witnessed coworkers showing up consistently late might get written up for tardiness even though no one else faces penalties for late arrival to work. Retaliation could also involve d scheduling someone for shifts where they might earn lower gratuities or providing them with fewer sales leads.
Any time a company takes punitive action toward a worker as a response to that worker engaging in a legally protected activity, they may have reason to suspect that those actions were retaliatory in nature. Fighting back against workplace retaliation may sometimes require employment litigation. Employees who can recognize business misconduct are often in a solid position to protect themselves and their careers.