Employment Discrimination Victims Need Employment Discrimination Lawyers
At Consumer Justice Law Firm, our employment discrimination lawyers help victims recover from the harmful consequences of discrimination and hold employers accountable for the bias, prejudice, and harassment they allow in the workplace.
GET JUSTICE for employment discrimination!
We fight to make employers
- Stop engaging in discriminatory behavior
- Pay you money for any harm they cause
- Pay your legal bills (you pay $0 out of pocket)
Table of Contents
What Is Employment Discrimination?
Employment discrimination is a workplace situation in which someone with decision-making authority or supervisory authority mistreats you based on protected traits or statuses unrelated to your job responsibilities, skills, experience, or performance.
This includes things like race, sex, gender, religion, disability status (ADA status), sexual orientation (LGBTQ status), military or veteran status, marital status, pregnancy status, mental health status, medical status, and others.
This mistreatment can include direct, targeted harassment or seemingly neutral policies that have an unfair impact on a single group of people with certain traits or statuses unrelated to the job.
6 Key Types of Employment Discrimination
- An employer or supervisor’s mistreatment, exploitation, or abuse of someone due to a trait or status unrelated to job ability or performance.
- An employer or supervisor allows another employee, client, or other person to mistreat, exploit, or abuse an employee due to a trait or status unrelated to job ability or performance.
- An employer or supervisor engages in sexual harassment of an employee, including sexual demands, comments, and hostilities.
- An employer or supervisor fails to provide reasonable accommodations for a qualified disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
- An employer or supervisor provides unequal pay for equally qualified and capable employees with equivalent positions, responsibilities, or seniority.
- An employer or supervisor engages in retaliation against an employee for questioning, complaining about, or pursuing help for discriminatory behavior.
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8 Ways Employment Discrimination Harms You
The law is very clear that employment discrimination is illegal, but that doesn’t prevent it from happening. Despite how it shows up, discrimination typically leads to tremendous harm, including:
- Financial Loss or Hardship. It doesn’t matter how hard you work if you’re not getting raises, bonuses, and prime positions due to reasons unrelated to your performance.
- Mental and Emotional Distress. When you’re subject to discrimination and harassment your mental well-being plummets. This can show up as anxiety, depression, sleeplessness, physical ailments, family stress, and more.
- Hiring Denials or Job Loss. At any phase of your career, unjust hiring and firing decisions can completely derail you.
- Promotion Denials. Whether you’re in line for a promotion, security clearance, transfer, or much-deserved assignment, being turned down for unjust reasons is not ok.
- Career Stagnation. Whether your employer unfairly denies you growth opportunities, being forced into a career dead zone is life altering.
- Employer Retaliation or Targeting. When you stand up for yourself and insist on equitable treatment, it can be like adding fuel to the fire of mistreatment, making things worse.
- Workplace Isolation. Whether it’s planned or simply the result of ongoing mistreatment, many workers experience isolation from colleagues, clients, and others.
- Unfair burdens. Being made to jump through hoops to prove yourself in a way that others aren’t or being denied reasonable accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) creates unfair burdens and roadblocks to success.
3 Steps To Take if You Suspect Employment Discrimination
STEP 1 Document everything
From the first moment you realize that something isn’t right, start taking detailed notes including dates, names, summaries, quotes, witnesses, steps taken or promised, threats, etc. Print emails, pay statements, and other documents. If an employer wants you to sign anything after you’ve stood up or filed a complaint, talk to an employment discrimination lawyer first.
STEP 2 Talk to an employment discrimination lawyer
The law upholds your right to a safe and fair workplace free from discrimination. But that doesn’t stop employers from misbehaving in big and brutal ways. An employment discrimination lawyer will clearly set out your rights, guide you through the legal process, and fight to get you money.
STEP 3 Enforce your rights
If your employer directly or indirectly discriminates against you, never accept their nonsense, stories, or threats. They may not do the right thing when no one’s watching, but a lawsuit from an employment discrimination lawyer usually gets the job done.
How An Employment Discrimination Lawyer Helps You Recover
Enforcing your right to fairness and equity at work shouldn’t be a complicated and convoluted process, but it frequently is. Working with an experienced employment discrimination lawyer gives you the best shot at a full resolution and maximum compensation.
Knowing when, how, and who to sue is everything. Here’s how an employment discrimination lawyer helps you:
- We know the law. Employment law can be complex, involving federal equal rights and non-discrimination laws, including the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Employment discrimination lawyers help navigate the laws.
- We know the problems. We’ve seen, heard, and handled every type of discrimination case, no matter how obvious the behavior or how subtle the policy. Our employment discrimination lawyers put their full knowledge and resources into everything they do.
- We know the tricks. We know the tactics used by employers to delay or avoid their legal obligations. They’d rather threaten, punish, or ignore you. Our employment discrimination lawyers outsmart their failed strategies.
- We provide legal guidance. We help identify and gather evidence, documents, witnesses, and more, and advise you on your rights and best practices along the way. Employment discrimination lawyers help navigate the legal process.
- We file with the EEOC. We know if you need to file formal regulatory complaints and guide you through the process, drafting legally sound documents to support your claims.
- We file a lawsuit. Our employment discrimination lawyers file a lawsuit to hold bad employers accountable.
- We get you money. If you’ve been harmed and you’re entitled to compensation, our employment discrimination lawyers know how to maximize the money you get.
Direct vs. Indirect Employment Discrimination
Employment discrimination lawyers handle cases that fall into either of two broad categories, direct discrimination and indirect discrimination.
Direct discrimination is when you, as an individual, are targeted with discriminatory treatment. Common examples of this are things like unjustified negative performance reviews, promotion denials, hiring denials, open hostility or harassment, raise denials, isolation, abuse, and other direct, immediate mistreatment that arises out of a trait or status unrelated to your job.
Indirect discrimination is when you are part of a group or class of people with a similar trait or status that is targeted for mistreatment through policies or procedures unrelated to the needs of the business or job.
Common examples of indirect discrimination are things like having policies that prevent employees from displaying or wearing religious items or having a no-beards policy. If these types of policies indirectly impact only employees of a certain religious, ethnic, or racial group and are wholly unrelated to the business or job, it is likely discrimination.
An employment discrimination lawyer will evaluate the nature of the job, your role within the business, and the claimed objective of the policy to determine if it counts as discrimination.
How Fee-Shifting Works
One of the most important and least known facts about working with an employment discrimination lawyer to protect your rights and fight back is that you don’t have to pay out of pocket for legal help.
Under the law, you do not have to spend your own money or take on debt just to uphold your right to be treated fairly and equitably at work.
At Consumer Justice Law Firm, we respect this fee-shifting provision for the role it plays in our legal system. It as an equalizer, bringing justice to everyone, including those who otherwise couldn’t afford to work with an employment discrimination lawyer.
The law has cleverly carved out a way to center equity and fairness in legal representation for people harmed by dubious or dangerous employers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who does an employment discrimination lawyer help?
The employment discrimination lawyers at Consumer Justice Law Firm help anyone who suspects they are being treated with discrimination at work. Perhaps surprisingly, employment discrimination can impact you at every level of your career- from entry level to advanced, or from factory floor to boardroom table. There is no magic that prevents discrimination in certain workplace environments.
Whether you’re freshly hired custodial staff or a neonatologist with thirty years of experience, you can face direct or indirect workplace discrimination. Guess what? Even attorneys face discrimination within law firms of every size. An employment discrimination lawyer helps employees navigate discrimination in even the most tricky or complex environs, including those with the most robust legal teams.
They may try to intimidate you, but they can’t intimidate us.
What can I do to prevent employment discrimination?
Unfortunately, nothing. Discrimination is unrelated to logic, fairness, reason, common sense, or business needs. It is born of nothing more than a flawed way of thinking that causes someone to have bias or prejudice toward people with certain traits or statuses. There is no amount of work performance, education, or attainment that can prevent you from being victimized by it, nor is there any legal mechanism for stopping it before it starts.
Employers and supervisors are well aware that the law prohibits discrimination in the workplace and yet it persists. However, though you can’t prevent it, you can adopt best practices for documenting it and combating it as soon as it starts. Not every instance of employment discrimination will require a lawsuit. Talk to one of our employment discrimination lawyers today for a free consultation about your next steps.