Workplace Discrimination
Labor & Employment Lawyers
If You Believe You May Be A Victim Of Workplace Discrimination, our Law Firm Can Help. El-Hag & Associates Represent Employees Who Have Been Discriminated Against in the Workplace
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Workplace Discrimination
If you believe you have been victim of discrimination at work, contact our experienced labor and employment workplace the discrimination lawyers to discuss your case.
Discrimination At Work
Speak out if you experience workplace discrimination. If you know someone who has experienced workplace discrimination, speak out on their behalf and encourage them to seek legal recourse
Discrimination Lawyers
Our Lawyers Could Help You File Complaints With the Appropriate Federal, State, and Local Agencies and the Courts Should Legal Action Be Required and help to legally protect you from any retaliation by your employer
“El-Hag helped me recover $100,000 in unpaid overtime because the time spent traveling was not paid”
DISCRIMINATION IN THE WORKPLACE LAWYER NY
We’ve helped employees just like you recover millions in damages. I can help you too!
Do you think that you might have been a victim of discrimination? El-Hag & Associates, P.C can help you. We are Westchester New York employment discrimination lawyers and labor lawyers. We have recovered hundreds of thousands of dollars for victims of workplace discrimination. We have brought discrimination lawsuits against small businesses and major multinational corporations and have achieved excellent results for our clients.
If you think you might be a victim of workplace discrimination, please call us today for a free consultation. We can quickly assess your case and let you know the options available to you. In most cases, it is very difficult to prove discrimination because there is no “smoking gun”, which is why it is best to schedule a consultation and go through the facts.
WHAT IS WORKPLACE DISCRIMINATION
There are three categories of employment discrimination:
1) “Disparate Treatment” employment discrimination:
Disparate treatment discrimination is the main type of discrimination that employees complain about. Disparate treatment means that you are being treated differently from other employees. It is a direct act of discrimination against you. Examples of this is where all white employees receive a raise but you as a minority do not, or a woman is not promoted because a lesser qualified man was promoted instead.
2) “Disparate Impact” employment discrimination:
Disparate impact means that your employer has a policy that is not discriminatory when you read it, but the result that the policy has is that it has a negative effect on a protected class (see below for more on the term protected class). An example of a disparate impact policy is when an employer does not hire employees with a criminal background. Many times, there is no legitimate business reason as to why an employer will hire no employees with any criminal background. And this can be discriminatory because, unfortunately, the minority population tends to have higher instances of criminal convictions. Disparate impact is seen most often in hiring policies.
3) Harassment in the workplace:
Harassment is a form of employment discrimination that violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, (ADEA), and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, (ADA). Harassment is unwelcome conduct that is based on race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information. Harassment is unlawful when:
Enduring offensive conduct becomes a condition of continued employment, or
The conduct is severe or pervasive enough to create a work environment that a reasonable person would consider intimidating, hostile, or abusive.
Offensive conduct may include, but is not limited to, offensive jokes, slurs, epithets, name-calling, physical assaults or threats, intimidation, ridicule or mockery, insults or put-downs, offensive objects or pictures, and interference with work performance. Harassment can occur in a variety of circumstances, including, but not limited to, the following:
The harasser can be the victim’s supervisor, a supervisor in another area, an agent of the employer, a co-worker, or a non-employee.
The victim does not have to be the person harassed but can be anyone affected by the offensive conduct.
Unlawful harassment may occur without economic injury to, or discharge of, the victim.
What Is Not Discrimination or Harassment
It is not harassment when people in the workplace make petty slights, are generally annoying, or make isolated discriminatory or derogatory remarks (unless extremely serious). To be unlawful, the conduct must create a work environment that would be intimidating, hostile, or offensive to reasonable people
Discrimination. Discrimination must occur because of your being part of a protected class. For example, an employer can decide that he will fire any person if they come 1 minute late to work, even if it happened only 1 time. But it would be discriminatory if the employer said that he is only going to apply that policy to Hispanics.
Examples of Gender Discrimination
- A male boss refers to his female colleagues as “girls”
- Employer denies benefits to female employees’ families while providing benefits to male employees’ families
- Paid less salary for equivalent work as male employees
- Denial of promotions while male employees with less experience are promoted (glass ceiling)
- Asked during a job interview whether you intend to start a family and have children
- Denial of requests to modify working hours to care for children, but male employees are granted such requests
How do you win an employment discrimination lawsuit
There are several factors that you must prove to win an employment discrimination lawsuit. If you can answer yes to the following questions, you may have been a victim of employment discrimination:
1) Do you work at a company with 4 or more employees?
The New York State Human Rights Law only protects employees who work for an employer with 4 or more employees. Federal Law requires that the employer employ more than 15 employees. So, the first thing to check is if you are protected by the law.
2) Did something bad happen to you at work?
- Being fired
- Being laid off
- Not receiving a raise
- Being demoted
- Being passed over for a promotion
- Being harassed at work
3) Are you a member of a protected class?
- Age
- Disability
- Equal Pay/Compensation
- Genetic Information
- Harassment
- Equal Pay/Compensation
- Sexual Harassment
- National Origin
- Pregnancy
- Race/Color
- Religion
- Retaliation
- Sex
4) Were you qualified to perform the job at issue?
You must be able to demonstrate that you had the right skill set to perform the job at issue.
- An example of being unqualified- is if you apply for a job as a lawyer, but you don’t have a law degree, you won’t be able to say that you were discriminated against if a law firm did not hire you.
- An example of being qualified and passed over in a discriminatory situation would be if you were a woman with the same or greater education as a man, and both of you applied for a job position. Both you and the man had equal experience working in the position you were applying for. If the man was hired, but you were not, the company will have to be able to provide a legitimate reason that you, as a qualified woman, passed over for the job.
5) Does it seem likely that the discrimination occurred because you are a member of a protected class?
This means that there is some evidence that shows that something bad happened to you at work BECAUSE you belonged to a protected class. There must be a believable cause-and-effect relationship between your being a member of a protected class and the negative job action. For example:
- You were fired BECAUSE you are HISPANIC
- You didn’t get a raise BECAUSE you were a WOMAN
- You were fired BECAUSE you were DISABLED
6) Is your employer’s reason for taking the adverse action a lie (“Pretext”)?
Your employer can take any negative action in the workplace as long as there is a legitimate reason for it, and it is not retaliatory. In almost 100% of the discrimination cases, your boss is going to have an excuse that explains why you were treated badly. It is your responsibility to demonstrate that your boss’s excuse is not true, and that the real reason is discrimination. For example, if you are African American and your employer fired you because you performed your job poorly or had a bad attitude, your boss can terminate you. But if every non-African American acts the same way and performs the job the same way as you, then your employer’s excuse that you performed poorly is most likely a lie.
Case Results
James
recovered $160,000 in severance pay and left work on his own terms.
Katrina
recovered $60,000 when her employer denied her leave for her disabled child (3 years pay)!
Tony
recovered $50,000 for losing his job after his boss made racists comments!
Monica
recovered $25,000 in unpaid overtime because her boss incorrectly treated her as not entitled to overtime under the law as a salaried office worker.
Manuel
recovered $45,000 as a deli worker because he worked more than 40 hours a week without overtime pay. The boss paid him off the books without paying him any overtime and we recovered an extra $10,000 in penalties.
Client Reviews
How We Help You Get the Compensation That You Deserve For Your Workplace Discrimination Case In Just 4-9 Months
Let our Workplace Discrimination Law Firm Fight for You
Don’t Let Your Employer Intimidate You From Being Compensated For The Discrimination in the Workplace That You Were Subjected To By Threatening Or Scaring You Into Inaction
- You can sue any company you worked for in the past three years. It does not have to be a company at which you are currently working.
- Attorney-Client Privilege- We CANNOT tell anyone about your case unless you ask us to. Your call is 100% confidential and protected by the attorney-client privilege.
- The law protects you. The law prevents retaliation. You can collect unpaid commissions and other lost wages and benefits, penalties, demand your job back, and even demand front pay (money to cover you for the time it would take to find new work.
- Attack only when you’re comfortable. We only move forward when you are ready. There is no pressure to start. You can have your workplace discrimination evaluation, come up with a strategy, collect evidence, and begin when you are ready.
Client Reviews
Why clients prefer El-Hag Law
Millions in unpaid wages on behalf of individual clients
Although we have litigated class action lawsuits, nothing makes us happier than handing an individual a check for tens of thousands of dollars. It’s a life-changing experience for most of our clients. That is why we focus on helping the most underserved people and take on the most challenging to win cases. We know how to win these cases and are not afraid to fight on our clients' behalf.
Experience representing employees on an individual or class action basis
Did you know that you could end up receiving less as being part of a class-action lawsuit instead of litigating your case individually? We have handled numerous cases where there are multiple clients, and we know when it would benefit our clients to be part of a class action or not. Generally, class actions benefit the lawyers more than the clients, and we will never put our interest before yours. We always keep our current clients' interests at the forefront of our decisions. Because we have experience handling class action lawsuits and individual lawsuits, we can help you make the right decision for your case.
Will take your case to trial if necessary
The truth is that most lawsuits settle. Many attorneys have no experience going to trial. However, we will. And because we will bring it to trial, we can get better settlements for our clients because other firms know we will go the distance.
Your case is handled by the same person from start to finish
How would you like it if the person who handles your trial is not the person who had all the experience of putting your case together from the beginning? Some law firms will have different people working on different parts of the case to make the firm more efficient. However, in the process, things can fall through the cracks. Not with us. One person handles your case from start to finish, so the representative is personally familiar with all people and facts.
There is an art to winning a lawsuit. How can a person know how a witness will behave at trial if they had no interaction with the witness before the trial date? It's impossible to be effective. These are the kinds of things most people do not know to ask when they are evaluating lawyers. But because we need to win your case to get paid, we make sure that your case does not fall through the cracks.
We care about you and your case
We don't nickel and dime clients for 1-minute phone calls. We put in the time to build relationships and educate our clients. We know this is a scary process for most people. Every client who has walked through our door has never been in a lawsuit before. We want to make sure you are comfortable and educated on what is going on with your case. We provide you with the right information to make educated decisions about your case. It takes time to build strong relationships, and we are happy to put in the time for you.
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