Los Angeles, California Employment Law Blog

A new rule proposed by the Department of Labor (DOL) and the Obama Administration would set a goal of hiring 7 percent of its federal contracting workforce as employees with disabilities. The proposed rule is not official yet; it will go through a review and public comment process that may change the percentage.

The proposed rule is over and above the regulations imposed by the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Under the ADA, employers must make only "good faith efforts" to avoid discrimination against the disabled in the hiring process. The new hiring standard would allow the DOL to get involved if a federal contractor was not in compliance with the percentage.

A federal court rejected the class certification of a large class of Hispanic and black homeowners based on the analysis in the U.S. Supreme Court employment law decision Wal-Mart Stores Inc. v. Dukes. This is only one of the cases that has relied on the important Dukes decision to deny certification to a class of plaintiffs.

In Dukes, the SC denied the class certification of around 1.6 million current and former female employees of Wal-Mart who alleged gender discrimination at Wal-Mart stores throughout the country. The court ruled that the class was too large to fulfill the requirements of the federal certification rules.

A sexual harassment legal claim requires that the treatment be "severe and pervasive." For employment attorneys, the work to show that the sexual harassment was severe is often to demonstrate the harassment's interference with the employee's work. It's much more likely that a sexual harassment claim will result in a finding for the victim when his or her work performance is affected.

When an employee has solid evidence to show that the sexual harassment was so pervasive that it affected his or her ability to do the job, the court or the jury will often side with the employee. That's because under the law, for a successful sexual harassment claim, the treatment may not be one isolated incident. Instead, for viable legal claim, the harassment needs to be on-going or serious enough to warrant a claim. To show the severity of the sexual emails, jokes, videos or other inappropriate conduct, the employee's work performance is a good measure, courts have said.

A bill sponsored by the Transgender Law Center and Equality California was signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown. The bill, Vital Statistics Modernization Act, makes changing ones birth certificate more simple for transgender Californians. Another bill, the Gender Nondiscrimination Act, was also signed by the governor and it adds to existing protection from discrimination for California residents who identify as transgender.

The Vital Statistics Modernization Act has been touted as a strong step to reducing the difficulty that transgender residents face with documents required by the state. The process for a person looking to change his or her gender on a birth certificate is streamlined. The only documents necessary to make the change is a note from a medical professional stating that the person has "undergone 'clinically appropriate treatment'," the Huffington Post reported.

As the sexual harassment controversy surrounding Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain grows, many employees are evaluating their own workplace incidents to determine whether it's sexual harassment. This post will help explain the elements of sexual harassment to help California employees understand a harassment claim.

Sexual harassment in the workplace is unlawful under both Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and California state law. The law aims to prohibit harassment to allow employees to do their job in an environment that is free of inappropriate comments and actions. Sexual harassment doesn't apply only to women either; men can also be subjected to impermissible sexual harassment. California law also requires that employers with more than 100 employees must provide sexual harassment training to prevent workplace infractions.

Despite a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that held that the class of plaintiffs in Dukes v. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. was not a proper class under the law, former female employees of Wal-Mart have refiled their lawsuit for sex discrimination. According to the lawyers for the plaintiffs, the new class is approximately 90,000 females, as opposed to the class of 1.6 million in the original Dukes class action suit.

The SC held in their June ruling that the class of 1.6 million women nationwide claiming sex discrimination against Wal-Mart did not share enough commonalities in their discrimination to fulfill the requirements of a class under federal class action laws. The Court held that the plaintiffs did not show that the acts alleged by the plaintiffs could be proven as occurring similarly to all member of the large class. The justices wrote in the majority opinion that "the respondents have not identified a common mode of exercising discretion that pervades the entire company."

As the campaign for a Republican presidential candidate heats up, one candidate has become the subject of sexual harassment allegations. Presidential candidate Herman Cain has been accused of engaging in sexual harassment by at least three different women, according to the Christian Science Monitor.

The alleged incidents occurred while Cain was the president of the National Restaurant Association in the mid-1990s. Cain is disputing the allegations of sexual harassment and said that all he was guilty of is "saying hello."

Nearly four months after the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Wal-Mart v. Dukes, many commentators and legal analysts are trying to determine the long-term effects of the ruling. In Wal-Mart v. Dukes, the Supreme Court held that the 1.6 million women filing the class action lawsuit did not have a viable claim against the retail giant for sex discrimination because their claims were not "sufficiently similar" enough to fulfill the requirements of a class action suit.

An interesting parallel is beginning to form in the wake of that ruling - many are comparing the Dukes decision with the recent class action suits against banks for mortgage lending fraud and discrimination. In two recent cases, the court has found in favor of the banking institution because the judge in each case failed to find a disparate impact in the lending practice for all of the named individuals forming the class.