Unlawful employment discrimination typically is created by Statute. For example, an employee has a Workers’ Compensation claim and the employer then terminates the employee. There are laws in Florida that bar or prohibit the employer from discriminating based on Workers’ Compensation retaliation.
Other laws would include laws prohibiting race discrimination, discrimination based on the gender of the person, laws that prohibit discrimination based on the person’s age.
Severance pay is either a voluntary payment by an employer when an employee is terminated, where the employer will pay the employee some money to ease the transition while the employee looks for new employment. Sometimes there is a contractual obligation to pay severance pay in the employment agreement. Many executives, for example, have contractual severance provisions when there are high level employees of a company that if their employment is terminated, they are given a large amount of money that helps defray the expenses that they’re going to have while they seek other employment with another company. Other times, employers will have employees sign severance agreements, where the employer is being released of any claims the employee may have, and in exchange, the employer is giving a lump sum of money or money paid out over time, again, to help defray the expenses the employee is going to have while they look for new employment.
Vicarious liability is when one party is held liable for the acts of another. For example, an agent of another person goes and commits an act, for example, an accident. The person who is the principal who hired that agent can be sometimes responsible for the agent’s act. That’s called vicarious liability.
Piercing the corporate veil is a way to go behind the corporate form. Typically, people will incorporate the corporation to limit their liability, their risk to the investment in the corporation. It’s very difficult to go behind that corporate veil, which is the corporate entity, to protect your investment in the corporation, but there are situations. Those would include, for example, using the corporate form in a fraudulent manner or not abiding by certain necessary corporate formalities. It’s a difficult process, because the idea behind corporations is to allow you to have the security of investing in an entity that you can use, and your limitation of liability is whatever the investment is.
The Faithful Servant Doctrine is a doctrine established in various courts that requires an employee to [disgorge 00:00:11] or repay the monies that he obtained or she obtained from the employer when the employee is being disloyal. An example would be where the employee is operating a competing business while still working for the employer. In that case, some courts have permitted an employer to recover not only the damages or the profits that the business created for that employee, but also the wages the employee was earning while they were basically cheating the employer.
Florida has a state statute that protects whistle blowers for private employers, it has another state statute that protects employees of public employers. The laws prohibit typically a person who has objected to or refused to participate in an unlawful activity of the employer and the laws protect the employee from a reprisal by the employer such as firing or making things much harder on the employee to continue the employment relationship.
The ADEA is the federal anti-discrimination law called the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, and it prohibits discrimination of a person who’s at least 40 years old.
The typical measure of damages in a Breach of Contract lawsuit are what are called Expectation Damages. It’s what the party that signed the contract expected to recover based on the promises of the other party. For example, a builder of a house contracts with the owner of the house. The builder builds the house in exchange for a certain amount of money. If the house is built, the builder is entitled to what he expects, namely, the amount that he was supposed to be paid once he finished the project.
An individual can file an employment discrimination lawsuit without a great deal of difficulty. Some employment discrimination laws require that there be an administrative process or an administrative remedy that’s exhausted such as going to the EOC or going to another government agency and having the agency first investigate the issue and then giving the employee clearance to file their law suit. Other anti discrimination laws, including those for example governing a race discrimination, do not require following this administrative process and a lawsuit can be filed immediately in court. The remedies the employee can recover are typically back wages, damages that would include emotional distress damages and sometimes front pay which would include future pay the employee would have gotten in the future, as well as punitive damages, which are punishment type of damages.
A charge of discrimination can be filed by a person who is allowed to be protected by a law. There are various laws in the state of Florida such as the Florida Civil Rights Act requiring at least 15 employees. Local ordinances also can reduce the minimum number of employees that are protected by a law. For example, Broward County and Miami-Dade County have different ordinances that allow employees to be protected from discrimination with just having simply five employees of the employer. These laws were designed by local ordinance to increase the amount of employees that can be covered by anti-discrimination laws.
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