Serving clients in Missouri and Illinois, we represent employees who’ve been mistreated by their employers. You have rights as an employee that are protected by law. These rights can be violated by your employer, managers, or even coworkers. This can lead to discrimination, harassment, or retaliation happening at work. You deserve to go to a workplace where you can just do your job without fearing discrimination or harassment.
We’re committed to helping employees whose rights have been violated. These violations can take many forms and here are some of the legal rights with which we help employees:
Employment Discrimination
Your job performance should be judged fairly based on your work ethic and quality–not based on your race, age, sex, pregnancy, disability, religion, or other basis protected by law. Anti-discrimination laws make it illegal for employers to discriminate in making decisions about hiring, firing, pay, or promotion based on someone’s protected trait. Unfortunately, employers sometimes violate these laws–often through the actions of poorly trained managers.
Determining whether you’ve been the victim of discrimination can be difficult. Employers rarely tell you directly that you’re being fired because of your race, or that they preferred hiring a candidate younger than you, or that you didn’t get the promotion because you’re pregnant. Our employment attorneys can help you decide whether to pursue a discrimination claim and guide you through the process for doing so.
Harassment
You shouldn’t have to go to work worrying that your manager will make a sexual pass at you, or your coworker will make a racist joke, or you’ll get a late-night sext from your supervisor. This is where laws prohibiting workplace harassment come into focus. Harassment at work is never okay. But unfortunately, it isn’t always unlawful.
Harassment is unwelcome conduct that creates a hostile, intimidating, or offensive work environment for an employee. Not all unwelcome conduct is illegal, however. Rather, the unwelcome comment must be based on a protected trait, like race, sex, age, or sexual orientation. Conduct that is mean or bullying, but not based on a protected trait, is not unlawful. (But is reprehensible.)
Further, harassing conduct must be severe or ongoing. It can be very difficult to meet the standard for harassment based on a one-time incident. Also, you’ll often have to give your employer a chance to fix the harassing conduct before pursuing a harassment claim against them. This means you’ll usually need to report the harassing conduct through your employer’s internal reporting procedure and cooperate with any investigation the employer conducts.
One common type of harassment is sexual harassment. This can involve various acts, like unwanted sexual advances, inappropriate comments or touching, sending explicit text messages or pictures, or requests for sexual favors in exchange for promotion or other benefits. Sexual harassment can be committed by anyone, including managers, coworkers, or even customers or vendors.
If you’re experiencing harassment or unwanted conduct at work, we can help you understand your options.
Retaliation
You have a right to raise concerns about your employer’s misconduct without fearing your employer will punish you in retaliation. If you report concerns of discrimination or harassment to your employer or an outside government agency, those reports are protected by law. Your employer can’t fire you as punishment for doing so.
Similarly, you may have heard of the term whistleblower. A whistleblower is someone who reports their employer’s illegal acts either internally or to a government agency. Whistleblowers are protected from retaliation by a number of laws under various circumstances. Protections for whistleblowers are vital as whistleblowers help to hold their employers accountable to act lawfully, ethically, and fairly.
If you’ve reported your employer’s discriminatory, harassing, or other unlawful conduct and believe your employer is retaliating against you for doing so, you’re not alone. We’re here to help.
Minimum Wage and Overtime
You should be fully paid for all of the work you perform. Under state and federal law, employees are entitled to earn a set minimum wage and certain employees must be paid overtime compensation for working more than 40 hours in a workweek. Generally, if you’re paid an hourly rate, you’re usually entitled to a minimum wage and overtime.
Unfortunately, there are number of situations in which an employer may fail to properly pay its employees. Sometimes employers will try to pay employees in cash instead of providing regular paychecks. But failing to provide employees with pay stubs violates the law. Similarly, some employers won’t allow their employees to record more than 40 hours worked in the week on their timesheets–even though the employees actually worked more than 40 hours. If your manager won’t allow you to record all the hours you actually worked, this is a red flag that you aren’t being fully paid overtime.
Sometimes employers wrongly believe that an employee is “exempt” from overtime because the employee is paid a flat salary. But being paid a salary alone doesn’t determine whether you’re exempt from overtime. It’s the type of duties combined with a salary that determines exempt status. Similarly, if you’re classified as a contractor but your work activities are under significant control at the workplace, you may actually be an employee entitled to minimum wage and overtime.
You should also be on alert if your employer asks you to work off-the-clock. This could include activities like attending meetings and training sessions, putting on and taking off protective gear and clothing, booting up computers, and cleaning equipment.
If you believe you haven’t been fully paid for your work, we can help you understand whether your rights have been violated and the recourse available.
Leaves of Absence
There are certain situations in which you may be legally entitled to take a leave of absence from work. This may include leaves related to pregnancy, childbirth, or adoption, family and medical leave, military service, workplace injury, disability, and more. Unfortunately, some employers are unaware of the laws protecting leaves or they misapply them. This can lead to employees being unfairly denied leave or even fired.
Generally, if your leave of absence is protected by law, your employer can’t retaliate against you for requesting or taking the leave. Your employer may also be required to reinstate you to your job when your leave is over.
If you’ve had issues with your leave of absence, we’re here to help.
Severance Agreements
Severance agreements may be offered by an employer when there’s little notice that the employee’s job is going to end, such as a position being eliminated. It’s important to understand that employers aren’t usually offering severance just to be generous. They’re offering it to protect their interests.
A severance agreement is a money offer from the employer in exchange for the employee agreeing to waive legal rights or agreeing to certain restrictions. The legal rights waived are often the ability to file a lawsuit against the employer for discrimination, harassment, retaliation, improper pay, or other future lawsuits. Restrictions on employees in severance agreements can include noncompete, nondisclosure, and no-solicitation provisions.
Employers may also try and create a sense of urgency to try and get employees to sign severance agreements right away. But it’s important to know that the terms are negotiable. You should speak with one of our attorneys before signing your rights away.
Noncompete Agreements
Employees are sometimes offered noncompete restrictions as conditions of getting the jobs they want. This can often seem like take-it-or-leave-it situation where the employee feels they must take it because they want or need the job. Unfortunately, this can leave the employee in a difficult situation if the job doesn’t work out later.
Generally, a noncompete agreement is a restriction on the employee’s ability to work for a competitor for a certain time after their job ends and within an agreed distance from their previous job. This can significantly impact the employee’s job prospects if they’re looking to leave their job or after their job has ended.
While noncompete agreements can be enforceable in court, it’s important for employees to know that these agreements aren’t always enforceable as written. Often, employers will draft the noncompete provision broader than needed to protect their legitimate business interests. As such, if you’re worried about the impact that a noncompete agreement will have on your job prospects, we can help you understand your options.
Reach Out To Us
We understand that it can be difficult to know where to turn when you’ve been discriminated against, harassed, or mistreated at work. There are times when you have questions about your pay or an employment contract and don’t know who to ask. Employers have lawyers and human resource professionals to protect their interests. We can help you understand how you can protect your rights.
If you believe you’ve been mistreated at work and would like to learn more about our services: