Employment Discrimination
PRF Law’s Employment Discrimination Practice represents people who have been denied employment opportunities under federal, state, and local laws based on a variety of protected statuses, including race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, military status or service, family responsibilities, genetic information, disability, marital status, personal appearance, political affiliation, or status as a victim or family member of a victim of domestic violence, a sexual offense, or stalking.
We file class action lawsuits and individual cases against employers, employment agencies, executives, and supervisors who discriminate against workers, including private companies and federal, state, and local governments.
We help workers negotiate settlements with their employers or former employers.
We also assist Congress, state and local officials, and workers’ rights advocates to draft employment discrimination laws to improve protections for workers, including through congressional testimony.
Federal, state, and local laws protect workers from discrimination and retaliation, including:
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars discrimination against employees and applicants based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin.
Section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which prohibits race and national origin discrimination in the workplace and other types of contracts.
Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967, which bars age discrimination against people who are 40 or order.
Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which bar disability discrimination and require employers to provide reasonable accommodations.
Equal Pay Act of 1963, which makes it illegal to pay different wages to men and women based on their gender.
State and local laws that prohibit employment discrimination and retaliation often provide greater protections than federal law, including by banning discrimination based on additional protected statuses.
Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act of 1994 (USERRA), which bars discrimination based on an employee or applicant’s military status or service.
Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008, which bars discrimination against employees or applicants because of the genetic information.
Federal and state whistleblower laws that protect workers and professionals who report unlawful conduct to their employers or to governments or suffer retaliation for doing so.
The Employment Rights We Enforce:
PRF Law enforces employment discrimination violations, including by representing workers and professionals and by representing unions and non-profits that serve as private attorneys general in enforcing the law. The types of violations we enforce include:
Denial of a job based on a person’s protected status.
Denial of a promotion based on a person’s protected status.
Termination or layoff based on a person’s protected status.
Unequal pay, compensation, or employee benefits based on a person’s protected status.
Policies or procedures that have an adverse impact based on a protected status and are not justified by business necessity.
Segregation or classification of employees or applicants based on their protected status.
Job ads or recruiting that discriminates based on a protected status, including by steering advertising or recruiting away from certain groups of people or by suggesting that the employer favors certain groups of people.
Retaliation against a person because they complained about or opposed discrimination against themselves or other persons.
Making an Impact
Peter Romer-Friedman has litigated groundbreaking employment discrimination cases and has obtained a number of novel settlements in class and individual cases, including high-profile disputes.
In Cote v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., No. 15 Civ. 12945 (D. Mass.), Peter was lead counsel in obtaining the first reported class action settlement for LGBTQ workers. Peter and his co-counsel, including GLAD Legal Advocates & Defenders, challenged Walmart’s prior policy of refusing to provide spousal health insurance benefits to employees with same-sex spouses as a Title VII violation. Although courts had previously rejected the view that LGBTQ workers are protected by Title VII, Peter and his co-counsel argued that it constitutes unlawful sex discrimination to discriminate based on a person’s sexual orientation or same-sex relationships—an argument that the U.S. Supreme Court would later adopt in 2020. In 2016, Peter and his co-counsel negotiated a $7.5 million class action settlement, with all class members who submitted claim forms receiving payments that were at least several times the value of the health insurance benefits they were denied over a three-year period. For their work on the case, Peter and the legal team were finalists for Public Justice’s Trial Lawyer of the Year Award.
In Rotondo v. JPMorgan Chase, No. 19 Civ. 2328 (S.D. Ohio), Peter and his co-counsel at the ACLU Women’s Rights Project obtained the first class action settlement of a case in which fathers claimed gender discrimination based on the denial of parental leave. In 2018, JP Morgan Chase had provided primary caregivers with 16 weeks of paid parental leave and gave 2 weeks of paid leave to non-primary caregivers. But the bank had assumed that birth parents were primary caregivers and made it challenging for fathers and other non-birth parents to qualify as primary caregivers. Peter and co-counsel argued that this policy constituted illegal sex discrimination and advanced an unlawful stereotypes that women should be caregivers and that men should return to work following the birth of their children. The case resulted a settlement with over 1,000 fathers in which Chase agreed to pay $5 million and modified its policy to make it fully gender neutral.
In an earlier case involving the denial of paid parental leave, Levs v. CNN and Turner Broadcasting, No. 410-2014-00427 (EEOC), Peter obtained a settlement in a high-profile action in which a CNN reporter challenged the amount of paid parental leave biological that fathers were offered by CNN and Turner Broadcasting as illegal sex discrimination.
In Mobley v. Facebook, Inc., No. 16 Civ. 06440 (N.D. Cal.), Peter was lead counsel in a first-of-its-kind challenge to Facebook’s practice of denying employment ads to Facebook users based on their race, sex, and other protected statuses. Peter was the chief negotiator in obtaining a 2019 settlement in which Facebook agreed to far-reaching changes to its advertising platform to prevent employment discrimination, including creating a special mandatory portal for the creation of housing ads without discriminatory filtering options.
In a related case, Peter represented older workers and the Communications Workers of America in suing Amazon and T-Mobile for excluding older workers from receiving their job ads on Facebook. That case, Bradley v. T-Mobile and Amazon.com, No. 17 Civ. 07232 (N.D. Cal.), settled with T-Mobile and Amazon in 2021, and the litigation caused many other major employers to stop the practice of steering job ads away from older workers online. In response to dozens of charges that Peter and the Communications Workers of America filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the EEOC declared that it violates federal law to deny online job ads to workers because of their gender or age.
In Awan v. House of Representatives, Peter represented IT staffer Imran Awan and several co-workers who were wrongfully terminated by dozens of House of Representatives offices after the Awans became the target of right-wing conspiracy theories. Peter won a $850,000 settlement for the Awans, which the New York Times said “represent[ed] one of the largest known awards by the House to resolve discrimination or harassment claims”.
Several years earlier, Peter settled one of the largest discrimination cases ever with a member of Congress. In Podliska v. House Benghazi Committee and Rep. Trey Gowdy, No. 15 Civ. 2037 (D.D.C.), Peter filed a lawsuit on behalf of Major Bradley Podliska, who alleged that he had been fired by the House Benghazi Committee for taking military leave from his job as a Committee investigator and for refusing to unduly focus on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the Committee’s probe. Major Podliska also brought defamation and due process claims against Rep. Trey Gowdy for making false and disparaging remarks about him. The Washington Post reported that “Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) used $150,000 in taxpayer dollars to settle with a former aide who alleged he was fired in part because he was not willing to focus his investigative work on Hillary Clinton.”
Relevant Cases
