Court bolsters anti-discrimination laws

WASHINGTON – To the surprise of civil rights advocates, the Supreme Court on Tuesday strengthened workplace anti-discrimination laws, ruling that employees who say they were punished for complaining of bias can sue for damages.

In a pair of decisions, the court concluded that claims of retaliation are covered by long-standing civil rights laws, even though this kind of discrimination was not mentioned specifically in the statutes.

This expansion of employee rights stands in sharp contrast to a series of pro-business rulings limiting the rights of workers that were made last year by the Supreme Court.

Tuesday’s decisions do not amount to a sharp change in the law. Most civil rights laws already protect employees against being punished for complaining of bias based on their race, religion, gender, national origin or age. However, in both cases the court read an older law broadly to give employees more rights to sue for discrimination.

In the first decision, the court said the nation’s oldest civil rights law, passed just after the Civil War, not only gives blacks the same rights as whites to make contracts, it protects them from being fired for voicing complaints about the mistreatment of other black employees.

The 7-2 ruling clears the way for a former assistant manager at a Cracker Barrel restaurant south of Chicago to take his lawsuit to a jury. He alleged that he was fired after complaining about a white supervisor who made racist comments and about the firing of a black food service worker.

In the second decision, the court said older federal employees who are punished after complaining of age bias can sue the government for this retaliation. Government lawyers had argued that these workers are protected by the civil service system and have no right to sue.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. disagreed, and spoke for a 6-3 majority in clearing the way for federal employees to sue if they were victims of on-the-job retaliation. The decision revives a suit filed by a 45-year-old postal clerk from Puerto Rico.

Civil rights and civil liberties advocates said they were pleasantly surprised by the two rulings. Steven R. Shapiro, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, said the rulings “are appropriately grounded in the realities of the workplace. Workers who fear retaliation are far less likely to report discrimination.”

Last year, the court was criticized by liberals for ignoring those realities when it threw out a pay-discrimination suit from Lilly Ledbetter, a woman manager from Alabama who had been paid far less than men in the same job. In a 5-4 decision, the court ruled she failed to cite recent acts of bias as required by the text of the law.

Robin Conrad, a lawyer for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said the reaction to that ruling may explain Tuesday’s decisions. “I think the court was stung by the reaction to Ledbetter,” she said. She added that Tuesday’s ruling may encourage suits against companies based on the 19th-century law because it does not have the same time limits for filing complaints and it could lead to larger damage awards.

Karen Harned of the National Federation of Independent Business agreed, calling the decisions “extremely disappointing for the small business community. Retaliation claims will be a boon for trial lawyers.”