Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘sex discrimination’

Serial complainants at the Department of Education

“Complaints of discrimination to the [Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights] have soared from 6,364 in fiscal 2009 to a record of 9,989 in the most recent fiscal year.” [Lyndsey Layton, Washington Post] Most notable sentence concerning that surging caseload: “Two individuals were responsible for filing more than 1,700 of those allegations of [education] sex discrimination.”

Related: how OCR acquires and uses financial leverage over academia [Hans Bader, CEI via Amy Alkon (“a bigger threat to innocent students is the massive financial risk colleges face if they do not swiftly expel accused students … Moreover, even when no court would award damages, OCR will. It has recently given itself the power to award monetary damages against colleges, even in situations where the Supreme Court’s Davis decision says damages would be inappropriate under the Constitution’s spending clause.”)]

Filed under: , ,

Labor and employment roundup

  • Loosen constraints on local and state deviation from the NLRA labor law model? Idea gathering force on right also draws some interest from left [Ben Sachs, On Labor, on James Sherk/Andrew Kloster proposal for right to work laws at city/county level]
  • Justice Alito dissents from Supreme Court’s denial of certiorari in Kalamazoo “employee buyer’s regret” case where asked-for transfer was later construed as retaliation [Jon Hyman]
  • NLRB’s franchise power grab could prove costly to small business [Diana Furchtgott-Roth, Connor Wolf]
  • A very different country: Supreme Court of Canada constitutionalizes a right of public employees to strike [On Labor]
  • Average full-time California municipal employee got 2013 compensation package of nearly $121,000 [Steven Greenhut]
  • Perfect, now let’s mandate sick day banking nationwide: “Montgomery [County] fire department has history of sick-day abuse among workers due to retire” [Washington Post]
  • Yet more unilateralism: Obama administration tightens regs on federal contractor sex discrimination [Roger Clegg]

Filed under: , , , , , , ,

How SCOTUS urban legends are made

No, the Supreme Court did not rule that firing a woman for breastfeeding is okay because men can lactate too. [Philip Miles, Lawffice Space]

P.S. Snopes weighs in (headlines “create a grossly misleading impression based upon one very minor element of a single aspect of the case”), prompting the ACLU’s Galen Sherwin to try a rescue mission in hopes readers would not lose interest in the case entirely once deprived of its clickbait elements. Raw Story, which did much to spread the silly meme, has now appended an easy-to-miss correction; Slate, which slapped an equally ridiculous headline on an Amanda Marcotte post, as of this writing has not.

Filed under: , ,

Labor and employment roundup

  • Senate Republicans make noises about reining in runaway EEOC [Roger Clegg, Senate minority staff report, Human Resource Executive Online]
  • Yes, minimum wage increases hurt many low-skilled workers [NBER via Charles Hughes]
  • “Women earn less than men even when they set the pay” [Emma Jacobs, FT, via Tyler Cowen]
  • Just a typical fast food worker, except for happening to have a high-powered P.R. firm representing him [Diana Furchtgott-Roth, Economics21]
  • Aaargh: “Federal judge wants to bury summary judgment for many reasons, but especially because it harms employment-discrimination plaintiffs” [CL&P]
  • “Ideally, someone from Human Resources will join you to meet with the aggrieved employee and inform her that the tree is staying up.” (Well, not up this far into January, but you know.) [Evil Skippy at Work]
  • “But”, sic: “Vermont has some of the most progressive wage-and-hour laws in the country, but low-income workers are still struggling.” [Alana Semuels, National Journal]

Filed under: , , , , ,

State of the Union speech

Update: I’m in this Cato video, my brief contribution on the president’s executive order powers beginning around the 2:15 mark:

I tweeted and liveblogged the State of the Union address last night so you wouldn’t have to watch. Here are Twitter highlights, in regular rather than reverse chronological order:

Filed under: , , , ,

Discrimination award $27K, attorneys’ fee award nearly $700K

A Ninth Circuit panel has ratified that result in a gender discrimination case under California law, ruling that federal district judge Claudia Wilken was within her discretion to approve the award even though, as defendant United Parcel Service argued, “plaintiff Kim Muniz recovered comparatively little in damages and had not prevailed on most of her claims.” [Julia Love, The Recorder; Muniz v. UPS]

Filed under: , ,

Update: “‘Unfireable’ NYC firefighter quits”

“The female FDNY probie who was allowed to graduate from the Fire Academy without passing a required running test has quit” after a sixth unsuccessful try to run a mile and a half in 12 minutes or less. Wendy Tapia will “return back to EMS ranks,” said a fire spokesman.

“It’s really not about her, it’s about preferential treatment,” said Paul Mannix, president of Merit Matters, a firefighter group that opposes hiring quotas. “People are encouraged that she won’t be fighting fires, not because she’s a woman, but because she couldn’t meet the standards.”

For an excerpt from my discussion in The Excuse Factory of litigation challenging timed tests for firefighters, see this 2007 post. [New York Post, earlier]

Filed under: , ,