Employment Discrimination
Employment discrimination is alive and well in California! In fact, it is all over the place but employment discrimination is more subtle and a lot harder to prove then it was years ago.
In today’s world there is a whole cadre of professionals including in-house human resources professionals, lawyers, investigators and expert witnesses all dedicated to suppressing and twisting the facts of what actually occurred when there has been an employee complaint of discrimination in the workplace. The human resources professionals hold themselves out to the company’s employees as being sincerely concerned about employee welfare and truly interested in ferreting out discrimination. In the typical situation of discrimination, if an employee speaks to someone in HR about the incident, the employee will be discouraged from making any kind of a formal, written, internal complaint. After all, that would create a paper trail and it would be evidence that the employee notified the company of the discrimination! The HR contact will usually point out all the reasons that informal, undocumented “reconciliation” would be the better way to go.
If an internal investigation is commenced, it will often be conducted by an attorney who can claim “attorney client privilege” to shield any negative information the investigator’s findings might turn up. The focus of any investigation will frequently be to whitewash what happened. The investigator, whether internal or brought in from the outside to conduct the investigation, will be skilled at manipulating what is put on the record in order to justify a finding that there was no discrimination. Should the employee file a formal administrative complaint of discrimination with the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing or with the EEOC and then bring a lawsuit against her employer, bring on the company lawyers to cover up and obfuscate!
Virtually all of the witnesses will be other employees at the company so the company’s lawyers can legitimately “represent” most of the fact witnesses at their depositions, giving the defense lawyers the opportunity to “woodshed” the witnesses and subtly communicate to them the message: hey, your job might be at risk if you go in there and blab that so and so did such and such. Conveniently, people who normally have absolute recall of even minor facts become unable to recall the facts of what happened that might incriminate the company. The company uses its deep pocket to hire expert witnesses with the most sophisticated and credible resumes to give opinion testimony that the complaining employee is crazy, is suffering from delusions and probably needs to be institutionalized! In other words, there is rarely a “gotcha” case of employment discrimination these days.
It takes a skilled plaintiff’s lawyer to bring out the inconsistencies between the testimony of the various witnesses and the documentary evidence to enable a jury to see through the clever cover-up to the real truth. If you still want to discuss your employment discrimination case with a lawyer after reading the preceding description of what you can expect to be confronted with in making a claim of workplace discrimination, I want to talk to you! Please read on!
