The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) turned 20 this year, with enforcement first taking effect on August 5, 1993. Sure, the FMLA is a “burden” on employers in the same way that weekends, lunch breaks, and the minimum wage are a “burden,” but it’s hard to argue with the basic precept that employees who work 1,250 hours a year at a company with the resources to handle employees calling out shouldn’t be entitled to a little bit of unpaid time off when they’re too sick to work or when they need to be good spouses, children, and parents by caring for their immediate family members.

But there’s always someone to complain about people doing the right thing instead of grinding themselves down making money for a big company. Thus, there’s been no shortage of complaints by begrumpled management-side lawyers about the “Friday-Monday Leave Act.” The Department of Labor looked into these concerns and found them mostly unfounded — few employees ever take out intermittent leave for self-care conditions like chronic pain, and few business can credibly report a loss in productivity or profitability — but that hasn’t stopped calls to weaken the FMLA.

I don’t tend to litigate FMLA cases, but I most certainly need Continuing Legal Education credits to remain a licensed attorney, so last week I went to a seminar on the FMLA hosted by a bunch of defense lawyers and, the lone employee-side lawyer, Ari Karpf of Karpf & Karpf out in Bensalem. What struck me most was how many employers just plain didn’t get it, and didn’t seem to recognize when they were doing something prohibited by the FMLA. So, as part of my real continuing legal education — i.e., reading up on new cases and discussing the law with other attorneys, instead of just sitting through a PowerPoint in a subzero, windowless conference room — I thought I’d do a brief survey of some recent FMLA cases to see how well businesses are doing in actually complying with the law.
Continue Reading 20 Years Later, Employers Still Don’t Understand Family And Medical Leave

Via Eric B. Mayer’s Twitter feed, I saw that a few days ago the Wall Street Journal’s blog for working parents, The Juggle, posted on a hot legal issue these days, “Should Pregnancy Be Treated as a Disability?”

A recent study by a University of Dayton law professor, Jeannette Cox, asserts that pregnant women should be covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act, to protect them from being fired or forced to perform labor that could be harmful to mother or child. (The paper is forthcoming in March in  the Boston College Law Review.)

The ADA doesn’t recognize pregnancy as a disability, leaving pregnant women physically and financially vulnerable on the job, concluded Cox, who studies employment discrimination. She found that pregnant women are at risk for losing their jobs when “reasonable adjustments” aren’t made, such as retail workers fired for drinking water at work or pregnant police officers forced to perform rigorous assignments (while injured officers were given lighter duty).

She’s not kidding about “water at work” — I’ve heard of plenty of cases about pregnant women whose employers denied them basic necessities like water or chairs or bathroom breaks. Professor Cox’s idea is eminently sensible, of course, because there’s really no difference between a complicated pregnancy and the types of permanent disabilities covered by the ADA, except that the former is usually temporary.

In general, a woman with an uncomplicated pregnancy is unlikely to need anything more than the types of “accommodations” most of us take for granted, like drinking water when we’re thirsty or sitting down when we need to rest our legs. Pregnancy usually becomes an issue in the workplace in two circumstances: either the employer started imposing extra restrictions on the pregnant employee (sometimes as a means to force the pregnant employee out and thereby avoid Family and Medical Leave Act duties, and sometimes just out irrational prejudice in violation of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act (PDA), an amendment to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964) or the pregnant employee developed a complication like pre-eclampsia, placenta previa, or gestational diabetes, and so has a weight/lifting restriction imposed upon them by their doctor.

At that point, the employer can either accommodate the pregnant woman, force her to take whatever family leave is available to her (often exhausting it before the birth of her child), or try to fire her. A disturbing number of employers do the latter two.Continue Reading Pregnancy Is (Legally) Like A Disability If Employers Accommodate Temporarily Disabled Workers

I complained back when the Supreme Court’s Perdue v. Kenny A. opinion first came out more than a year ago, knocking down attorney’s fees awarded to a set of extraordinary children’s rights lawyers:

It’s no stretch to say those lawyers single-handedly reformed the foster care system in metropolitan Atlanta.

And they did that by spending their own money and putting in their own time, with no guarantee they would recoup any of their out-of-pocket costs, much less get paid a fee for their services. Had they been paid by the hour as they went along, their services would have been worth more than $7 million.

But they weren’t paid by the hour to pursue the case. They were paid nothing at all; instead, they paid money — $1.65 million — for the privilege of cleaning up abuse and neglect in the foster care system.

As Blawgletter explains, there’s a big difference between getting paid to defend a case and paying to pursue one. The former is safe and simple and can be done in perpetuity. The latter is risky and complicated and can only be done for as long as funds are available.

Class actions are, by their nature, extraordinary, more expensive and riskier than even ordinary contingent fee representation. The District Court that oversaw the Perdue litigation recognized that and awarded the plaintiffs’ attorneys their costs, their $7 million or so in hourly fees, and then gave them an “enhancement” of $4.5 million.

The Supreme Court — the Justices of which have a combined experience in contingent fee litigation of exactly 0.0 hours — reversed, holding the plaintiffs’ lawyers, who fought for years without being paid a dime and indeed paying out their own money to fund the case, were entitled only to a fee “that roughly approximates the fee that the prevailing attorney would have received if he or she had been representing a paying client who was billed by the hour in a comparable case.”

It was a phony and vindictive legal fiction designed to dissuade plaintiffs’ lawyers from taking these cases, part of a long campaign against class actions in general that culminated in the Wal-Mart v. Dukes opinion.

Last week, the opinion came back around again to bite a group of employment discrimination lawyers who had been litigating a Title VII class action since 1997. Via the Workplace Class Action Blog comes McClain, et al. v. Lufkin Industries, Inc., No. 10-40036 (5th Cir. Aug. 8, 2011). As they describe:

Plaintiffs had filed a class action in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas under Title VII alleging that defendant engaged in unlawful employment practices, including disparate treatment and disparate impact. Id. at *2. The district court certified a class. Id. at *3. After realizing that defendant was not going to settle the case and that they did not have the resources to prosecute an employment class action through trial, plaintiffs’ counsel sought the assistance of another law firm. Id. However, plaintiffs’ counsel was not able to find another law firm in Texas that was willing or able to commit the time and resources necessary to assist in the prosecution of the class action, so plaintiffs’ counsel was forced to turn to an Oakland, California firm with a nationwide reputation as a plaintiffs’ employment discrimination class action firm. Id. at *3-5.

The opinion (here’s the copy at the Workplace Class Action Blog) includes at footnote 4 some remarkable comments about how risky and unprofitable it is to take on these types of cases:

J.  Derek Braziel,  an  experienced Texas litigator in  labor and
employment law, explained: “I do not work on employment discrimination class action cases for largely financial reasons, even though I am competent and have the resources to do so. . . . Employment discrimination class actions usually take much longer to litigate than the average employment discrimination  or wage and hour  case.  Defendant companies often use their substantial  financial advantage  to  outstaff  and  outwork plaintiffs with  limited  personal resources.  …

Steven B. Thorpe, an experienced litigator in Dallas, declared: “My practice focuses in large part on employment civil rights cases in which I represent plaintiffs. . . . [T]he greatest portion of my practice prior to approximately 1985 was in the representation of plaintiffs in class action discrimination suits.  At that time I and the firm with which I was associated largely abandoned that area of practice because we found it to be financially infeasible. At this time and for more than a decade I have done no class action employment litigation.

All of that hesitation despite the extraordinary facts that the plaintiff’s lawyer, Timothy Garrigan, had discovered and proven in front of the court during class certification:

During the class certification hearing, one allegation was that African American employees were disproportionately sent to Lufkin’s foundry to work under horrible conditions. The company officials were testifying that the conditions there weren’t so bad. Judge [Howell] Cobb immediately recessed the class certification hearing and ordered everyone to take a tour of the foundry when no one was expecting us to be there.

It was actually the first time I’d been there. The descriptions I’d heard of the place were like something out of Charles Dickens or the Dark Ages, and they turned out to be accurate. It was hot, dark, dirty, ankle deep in dust, with flames leaping out of the darkness just a few feet away from you. It was everything the plaintiffs had been describing. I do think that was a significant point in the case. It confirmed what many of the plaintiffs had been saying and contradicted much of what the company had been saying.

Literally unable to find anyone in Texas willing to take the case, Garrigan reached out across the nation and found Goldstein, Demchak, Baller, Borgen & Dardarian in California, which has long fought these sorts of battles. As Garrigan described back in 2008, while the case was still going on:
Continue Reading Perdue v. Kenny A. Keeps On Punishing Class Action Lawyers

Via Atrios, we have Stanley Fish’s recent NYTimes column, The Rise and Fall of Academic Abstention:

As recently as 1979, legal academics Virginia Nordin and Harry Edwards were able to say that “historically American courts have adhered fairly consistently to the doctrine of academic abstention in order to avoid excessive judicial oversight of

As you may already know (Google News already lists 300+ articles on it):

A state investigation found that a Montgomery County swim club racially discriminated in June when it revoked an agreement to allow a Northeast Philadelphia day camp to use its pool after 56 African American and Hispanic children made their first visit.

The AmLaw Daily reports:

When news broke Wednesday that guitar virtuoso Joe Satriani’s copyright suit against the band Coldplay had been settled, the Litigation Daily raced to Pacer to download the documents. After all, it’s not every day that a copyright dispute between an aging guitar god and one of the biggest rock bands