Princeton Employment Law Blog

A young mother says her rights as an employee were violated after she was wrongly terminated by her employer for going on leave for her pregnancy. Certain workers have employee rights under the Family and Medical Leave Act, and the federal law provides up to 12 weeks of unpaid time off for parents with arriving newborns and provides the same amount of time to allow family members to take care of certain loved ones. In addition, the Family and Medical Leave Act protects the jobs of employees while on leave.

A 31-year-old senior program manager with a marketing company claims her former employer asked her to resign instead of allowing her to go on leave for her pregnancy. The company informed the mother-to-be that she was not entitled to leave under the FMLA because she had only worked for the company for four months instead of the requisite one year.

According to one pregnant worker advocate, many pregnant employees who ask for accommodations at work are asked to resign. The 31-year-old mother-to-be left a previous job for a position at the company, and when she informed two human resource executives of her pregnancy they told her she would have to resign because she had not been with the company for 12 months. One of the executives explained that whether she was a sick person or a pregnant woman who had not been with the company for a year she would be treated the same.

Workers in Mercer County, New Jersey should pay attention to the results of a recent case against Pepsi Beverages Co. According to reports, the company was charged by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission with racial discrimination. The company had been using criminal background checks to eliminate applicants who were not convicted of crimes.

Because of this policy, the company had "disproportionately" screened more than 300 African American individuals from receiving positions with the company. In most of the cases in question, arrest records were present, but convictions were not. Others were barred from employment because of minor offenses.

A complaint made by a woman from Lawnside, New Jersey, has been filed against the parent company of a former employer. She alleges that she was subjected to regular sexual harassment during the course of her employment, which began in spring of 2009 and ended last summer.

Her attorneys have filed a lawsuit against CBS Radio, Inc. for the alleged discrimination that she went through while employed as the director of marketing and communications at KYW Newsradio 1060. She says that her male coworkers at the station subjected her and several other employees to crude taunts, sexual innuendos, hostility and sexual touching.

The executive director of the Waterfront Commission of New York Harbor says that women are the minority when it comes to working on the docks in New Jersey. Approximately 10 percent of deep sea longshoremen in New Jersey and New York are women and the inequalities that stem from this are apparent. According to some, women make 35 percent less on average than men in the industry. This is allegedly because of the types of equipment that men and women operate as well as the number of hours they can work.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says that advancement for women in this industry may depend on how receptive they are to unwelcome sexual advances by their superiors. This statement came after a woman from Newark, New Jersey reported being touched by a foreman with Ports America. Her hours were cut soon after she reported the incident.