2004’s most bizarre employment suits

Attorney Gerald Skoning of Seyfarth Shaw in Chicago does one of these roundups every year (see Apr. 1, 2003 and Apr. 13-15, 2001). Among his winners in this year’s compilation: the case in which the Seventh Circuit ruled punitive damages excessive following a supervisor’s history of remarks like “You’re being a blonde again today”; the […]

Attorney Gerald Skoning of Seyfarth Shaw in Chicago does one of these roundups every year (see Apr. 1, 2003 and Apr. 13-15, 2001). Among his winners in this year’s compilation: the case in which the Seventh Circuit ruled punitive damages excessive following a supervisor’s history of remarks like “You’re being a blonde again today”; the Nova Scotia case in which a court of appeal found that a worker of Mi’kmaq tribal origins was not discriminated against by her boss’s having called her Kemosabe, “the oft-used word from the 1950s show The Lone Ranger”; and a case in which a manufacturing worker who’d engaged in flirtatious banter was reinstated after his dismissal, the arbitrator noting that so far as atmosphere goes “the shop floor is entirely unlike high tea at the Savoy”. (“The 10 Most Bizarre Employment Cases of 2004”, National Law Journal, Apr. 20).

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