The Employment Brief

I wrote about this last year, because in 2010, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission received nearly 100,000 new charges of workplace discrimination, the highest figure ever.  In the Baltimore Region, there were approximately 3,300 pending charges and about 13 investigators to handle them.   Well, 2011 was another banner year for charges being filed, and particularly in the Baltimore area.  The back log still exists and there is no quick...

The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA), 42 U.S.C. § 2000ff, was enacted in 2008 to prevent discrimination on the basis of genetic information in employment and health insurance.  Title I of the Act focuses on issues in health insurance, and is administered by several federal Departments, while Title II prohibits employers from using genetic information in employment decision-making and is administered by the Equal Employment...

In Coleman v. Maryland Court of Appeals, 626 F.3d 187 (4th Cir. 2010), the Fourth Circuit joined five other appellate courts in holding that the self-care provision of the Family and Medical Leave Act, does not apply to the states because Congress did not properly abrogate the states’ Eleventh Amendment immunity.  Despite the lack of any apparent Circuit split on the issue, the Supreme Court granted Coleman’s petition for a writ of certiorari to...

Over the past year, the “card check” legislation ironically known as the Employee Free Choice Act (“EFCA”) has garnered a lot of attention.  With large Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress and a liberal Democrat in the White House, it seemed only a matter of time until organized labor received a payoff for its nearly $10 million dollar investment in President Obama and EFCA became law. Now, as EFCA languishes in the Senate...

Mixed-motive theory was legislated into Title VII with the 1991 Civil Rights Act.  The theory provides that an employee may prevail in a case in which she demonstrates that illegal considerations were “a motivating factor” in the adverse employment decision, even where the employer would have made the same decision absent the illegal considerations. There is no similar provision under the FMLA (or any other anti-discrimination law for that...