by "ImmoralMinority" (araimondo)
Published 04/27/2017 at 09:14
by "ImmoralMinority" (araimondo)
Published 04/27/2017 at 09:14
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STARS: 4
Yesterday, I settled an EEOC case that was essentially a misunderstanding by having my client give the guy his job back. It was all he wanted, which was nice.
Today is a different animal.
I represent a Korean family that has a business that employs mainly Mexican women, about 35 employees, who speak only Spanish. Mom and Dad speak only Korean, and the son speaks heavily accented English.
They have been sued by EEOC for discriminating against pregnant women. The good news is that when we investigated, the employees universally told us that it was no problem to take time off to have a baby, and that the company provided modified work to accommodate pregnant employees.
The bad part is that both the son and dad were heard saying comments like “no more babies.” The person who heard it did say they might have been joking, but it is still bad.
The problem is really that you have immigrants who own a business employing other immigrants where there is a massive disconnect of both language and culture. I can fix this, as this is a lot of what I do.
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The big problem? The government wants $354,000. My clients made $50,000 in profit last year - for the whole family.
I want to have them use the settlement to build HR support with formal structure ans documentation so we make things better for both employer and employees, but they generally want some blood, too.
Wish me luck. I am going to need a radical set of tools.
"Stapleface" (patrickgruden)
04/27/2017 at 09:44, STARS: 0
So, who’s actually suing them? The gov’t? If the client needs to pay, can’t you ask for a modified judgement amount since your party clearly doesn’t have the capital to pay?
"WilliamsSW" (williamssw)
04/27/2017 at 09:44, STARS: 1
Hopefully the gummint can wrap their head around the fact that putting this company out of business probably *isn’t* the best solution for these 35 employees? If only the bureaucrats could realize this...
"facw" (facw)
04/27/2017 at 13:10, STARS: 1
Not for these 35 employees, but the government has to be concerned with all workers, not just these. If you let violations go, then poorly managed operations will out-compete ones that do things properly and everyone ends up in crappy situations. That said, obviously the ideal solution is one that compensates employees for any harm they’ve been subjected to, and creates sufficient incentive to stop bad behavior going forward, but without tanking the business if at all possible.
Obviously you can debate whether there was actually a problem here at all, and how damaging it was, but you can’t ignore illegal labor practices just because of short term harm to the workers.
"WilliamsSW" (williamssw)
04/27/2017 at 13:26, STARS: 0
I wouldn’t argue with any of what you said, and I’m not suggesting whether there should or should not be any penalties. But, if the government puts small businesses under due to technical violations, it creates a greater disincentive to workers to make a valid complaint to begin with- particularly if the complaint is relatively minor and/or unintentional.