Supreme Court Rules for Workers in Two Retaliation Cases
Updated: The U.S. Supreme Court held today that workers who accuse their employers of penalizing them for complaining of workplace bias can sue under two laws that do not explicitly offer protection for retaliation.
In one of the cases, the court ruled 6-3 that the Age Discrimination in Employment Act protects federal workers from retaliation, the Associated Press reports. The court ruled in the case of postal worker Myrna Gomez-Perez.
The law explicitly protects private workers from age-related retaliation claims but is not specific as to federal workers. The law says all federal workers over 40 “shall be free from any discrimination based on age.”
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote in his majority opinion (PDF via SCOTUSblog) that the bar on discrimination based on age includes retaliation based on the filing of an age bias complaint.
Alito said prior Supreme Court decisions had treated similar language in other statutes as offering protection.The case is Gomez-Perez v. Potter.
In the second case, the court ruled 7-2 that retaliation is barred by section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act, which has a longer filing deadline than Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. The case is CBOCS West v. Humphries, SCOTUSblog reports.
The suit was filed by Hedrick Humphries, a black manager who says he was fired by a Cracker Barrel restaurant after complaining of race bias by other supervisors, the Associated Press reported in a separate story.
Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote in his majority opinion (PDF posted by SCOTUSblog) that section 1981, enacted after the Civil War to give blacks the same rights to contract as whites, offers protection from retaliation for complaining about others’ contract-related rights.
Breyer cited Supreme Court interpretations of another Civil War-era law, this one protecting the right to own property. The view that section 1981 protects against retaliation is “well-embedded” in the law, he said, and a different interpretation “would necessarily unsettle many court precedents.”
Updated several times to supply additional details.
