Employment Lawyer Chris McKinney Answers the Question: What Kind of Workplace Retaliation is Actually Illegal?

San Antonio employment lawyer Chris McKinney explains what types of employment retaliation are actually illegal.

Transcript:

Hi everybody, this is Texas employment lawyer, Chris McKinney. Today, I wanna talk to you a little bit about employment retaliation. Retaliation at work and, more specifically, what kind of workplace retaliation is actually illegal. We get calls from potential clients and just employees who have questions about, "Hey, I'm being retaliated at work because I reported my boss for something, or because I took a particular action or stood up for myself. And I think maybe I have a cause of action, do I or not? So, in order to answer that question, we really need to get to the why of why someone was being retaliated against because not all types of retaliation are actually illegal. Specifically, was the employee being retaliated against for what we call a protected activity? So if you just report your boss because your boss is being a jerk, that's probably not a protected activity by statute. If you are reporting something that you consider to be unethical, but it's not really illegal, then that's probably not a protected activity. And a lot of employees have difficulty with this because it seems terribly unfair, and indeed it is. But very often, what is unfair or morally wrong, simply isn't illegal in the workplace. So let's talk about what types of things actually do qualify as protected activity. Typically, more often than not, the type of conduct that is protected is making a report to a management level employee or to HR that either you or someone that you know is being discriminated against in the workplace due to an EEO category, because of their race or because of their national origin or because of their sex or because of their religion or disability, that type of thing. Those types of reports are definitely protected activity. Another common protected activity is participating in an internal investigation of a report of EEO based discrimination, whether it's your report or someone else's. Your participation in that, being interviewed by HR, giving truthful answers to HR, even if they're bad for management, that's protected activity. So in those cases, if the company retaliates against you, typically by firing you, although that's not the only type of actionable retaliation, demotions, and other types of negative conduct that hurts your standing in the workplace can be actionable retaliation. But typically it's a termination is what we're looking at. If the company terminates you for taking that type of protected activity, then yes, you may have a valid retaliation claim. Other types of retaliation claims involve, say, taking FMLA leave and the manager didn't like that you took FMLA leave and so as soon as you get back from FMLA leave, all of a sudden you're written up and shown the door and terminated for taking that family and medical leave. That can be actionable retaliation. The last, most common type, and perhaps not as common as the others, is reporting EE actually illegal conduct inside the workplace. Texas has some very narrow whistleblower protection for public employees, not for private employees, for public employees for reporting certain types of illegal conduct. What types of illegal conduct, are a little bit beyond the parameters of this video, we'll talk about that in an upcoming video. Another, for private employees though, if you work for a large publicly traded company, meaning that the company is so big, it has stock on the stock market and you report certain types of fraudulent illegal activity, like making false reports on accounting reports or on stock reports, that sort of thing, and you're terminated for that, that can be actionable retaliation. There are also a number of statutes that provide protection for specific types of employees, such as healthcare workers who might report that someone within their facilities care is being mistreated medically, or harmed, and the company retaliates against them for that. That can be an actionable type of whistleblower retaliation. And there are a number of these types of statutes from everything from transportation to trucking, to healthcare, nursing, physicians, that sort of thing. So it's important if you believe that you're being retaliated against because of some illegal conduct or because you have reported illegal conduct that you visit with an employment lawyer as soon as possible to find out if the retaliation that you are suffering may be illegal. And if so, if you're still working for the employer, is there perhaps a way for you to protect yourself? If you have any questions, feel free to give us a call, our contact information is in the information below, you can... The easiest way to get to us is through our website. We're happy to speak with you and look at your potential matter. We do it every single day for employees all over the state of Texas. If you found this information helpful, please like and subscribe the video. That helps spread the video around through the magic of the algorithm and helps other people find us who might be having similar problems. Thanks a lot for watching. We'll see you next time, bye-bye.