I was quoted in a piece published in Business Insurance discussing the Supreme Court’s review of three cases related to sexual orientation and gender identity discrimination protections under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Two of the cases, Melissa Zarda et al. v. Altitude Express and Gerald Lynn Bostock V. Clayton County, will be heard together. Both cases include employees contending they were fired from their jobs due to their sexual orientation.
The third case, R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, will be heard separately. In that case, the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati ruled in favor of a transgender worker who was fired when she told her funeral home employer she was undergoing a gender transition from male to female.Continue Reading Three Supreme Court Cases Seeking Protection for LGBT Employees
In an article published in the Nashville Business Journal’s Largest Employers special report on July 6, 2018, I provided a column highlighting three important questions for employers to ask as they strive to reduce harassment in the workplace and cultivate a healthy workplace environment. The effectiveness of an anti-harassment policy often comes down to employee perception of how the policy is enforced, trained and embraced by leadership, so it is important that employers are mindful of the answers to these questions:
Tim Garrett provided insight on background check best practices as employers seek ways to balance the need to validate applicants’ background and experience with compliance and privacy issues, particularly amid a surge of legislation, litigation and public scrutiny.
I provided an update on the August 2017 decision by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that a picketing worker from Cooper Tire should not have been fired for yelling racist insults at a busload of African-American replacement workers. The Eighth Circuit’s decision affirmed the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) decision that the company
In an article for the October 2017 issue of The Corporate Counselor, Bass, Berry & Sims attorney Tim Garrett examined the latest ruling related to the Department of Labor’s (DOL) overtime rule following Texas Federal Judge Amos Mazzant’s final rule striking down the Obama-era rule. If implemented, the rule would more than double the minimum salary that employers would have to pay “white-collar” workers to meet overtime pay exemptions. Judge Mazzant’s final ruling cited that the DOL rule had made the salary level too high and that the exemption would inadvertently become based on pay and not duties of the position. Following the ruling, the DOL withdrew its appeal of the preliminary injunction and the Fifth Circuit granted the request.