Legal News

High Court Decision Bolsters Employees Who Oppose Bias

By Dan Slater

In their last day of work before heading off on winter break, the Supreme Court justices issued five dissent-free decisions on Monday.

For our purposes, let’s focus on a case called Crawford, since it, according to reports, fits nicely into a series of cases in recent years that protect employees who oppose race or sexual discrimination at work. In Crawford, the court decided that managers can’t retaliate against employees who cooperate with internal investigations into workplace discrimination. The Crawford decision, notes the WSJ, underscores the court’s rejection of technical arguments that could chill discrimination investigations. (Click here for the WSJ story, here for SCOTUS blog analysis and here for the opinion. For good measure, here’s a local report from the Tennessean.)

Here’s what happened: In Nashville, officials were investigating harassment allegations against the school district’s employee-relations director, Gene Hughes, whose duties included reviewing discrimination complaints. Three female employees contacted by an investigator described harassment they allegedly saw or received, such as being asked to display their breasts. The investigator reported that she couldn’t corroborate the worst allegations against Hughes, but that his behavior was “inappropriate and unprofessional.” Officials took no formal action against him, but all three women who described his alleged behavior lost their jobs.

One of the women, Vicky Crawford, filed a complaint with the EEOC and sued in federal court, citing Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which protects from retaliation those who oppose discrimination in the workplace or participate in a probe of it. The Sixth Circuit rejected the suit: because Crawford simply cooperated with an investigator who sought her out, she had been too passive to demonstrate sufficient “opposition” to the harassment.

In Monday’s decision, Justice Souter wrote that the lower court’s standard would create “a freakish rule protecting an employee who reports discrimination on her own initiative but not one who reports the same discrimination in the same words when her boss asks a question.”

For more on Monday’s Supreme Court action, click here for an NYT report.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on January 27, 2009 (boomark / email).