Chapter 6 - Retaliation

It is against the law to fire or discriminate against an employee for filing a complaint or for participating in a legal proceeding for violation of overtime pay or wage-and-hour requirements. If your employer has done this, she can be held responsible, both civilly and criminally, for those actions.

Common examples of retaliation include:

• Firing the employee for no reason or a fabricated reason
• Refusing a raise regularly given
• Assigning an employee to less desired job duties or shifts
• Reducing job duties
• Blacklisting an employee
• Not hiring an applicant who made an FLSA claim against another company
• Firing a relative of the employee
• Lowering performance reviews
• Disciplining an employee out of proportion to other prior disciplinary practices

Your attorney should be very interested in discussing your employer’s adverse employment action against you as result of asserting your rights. You can sue just for being the victim of such retaliation. You can even receive punitive damages if the retaliation was particularly egregious.

If you are threatened while you are represented by a lawyer, tell your lawyer. There are a number of responses you can discuss. Often, if a lawsuit is pending, an employee’s lawyer can discuss the threat with the company’s lawyers and the threats will usually stop. Most companies do not want to a retaliation lawsuit in addition to the other issues which it may be facing.

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