Dive Brief:
- The Supreme Court, in a 7-1 decision, has specified when the clock starts for plaintiffs who have been effectively fired because of discriminatory treatment, otherwise known as "constructive discharge," according to the Chicago Tribune.
- The land's highest court strongly agreed that if an employee quits and says discrimination drove him or her to it, the discrimination claim starts the day the person quit, not when the discriminatory treatment allegedly took place.
- That gap between the discriminatory event and the quitting could shorten the time a person could file their complaint based on EEOC guidelines, which is a 45-day deadline.
Dive Insight:
Based on a case where an African-American postal worker in Englewood, CO., who felt he was denied a promotion due to discrimination was threatened with relocation to Wyoming, the Court's primary legal argument, penned by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, was that the claim for constructive discharge couldn't be filed until the employee quit. She said in her opinion that someone facing bad treatment might not quit their jobs right away for several reasons, one being economics.
Before the Court's decision this week, if an employee remained at their job after discriminatory treatment, that 45-day window could be closed before an employee could file a discrmination claim with the EEOC. But not any more.
Hopefully, employers are not engaging in constructive discharge behaviors, but this decision means those employers who do can't count on that 45-day time period starting the day their discriminatory actions took place. From now on, it will start when the employee in question leaves the job.