What Retaliation Looks Like

Hey, it's Mark, and welcome back to the Employee Survival Guide. And today's uh topic is retaliation at work. It's my favorite. Well, one of my favorites. You complain about harassment, unpaid overtime, or unsafe working conditions. Suddenly your performance reviews tank. You're excluded from meetings or you're put on a pip. That stands for the performance improvement plan, if you didn't know it. That's retaliation at work. And it's illegal. And even if your original complaint turns out to be wrong, you still have legal rights. And that's what I'm trying to express here in this episode. It's very short. Retaliation at work is real. It's very, very common. It's probably the most prominent claim reported to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission besides pregnancy discrimination. And here's what you can do. The first thing is I always tell you is to write all your facts down first. You've got to write your narrative. You've got to know what your facts are in the order that they occurred. And it takes a while to prepare that. So put your facts together first, even before you complain about anything. Just know what you're complaining about. So a retaliation log is something you prepare the same day something happens. And you really want to basically treat it as a journal writing exercise just to record everything. I recently met a client who was a very, very active recording of journals, entries of things that happen daily. And he used it to uh build his case, so to speak, and he had all the notes. So if you if you do it after the fact, it's not as contemporaneous, doesn't have all the the uh memories you have. So if you are in the midst of some employment situation brewing, start a journal. And it's really important because that's what the case is about. And if you don't know it, the valuation of your case is dependent upon factually what you say. So when you're building a case of retaliation, in this instance, retaliation at work, you want to really document factually what's taking place. So that journal, that log, eventually becomes an affidavit. The lawyers will use it to create the case. You'll actually sign a notarization to swear that it's true and accurate under penalty of perjury, and it will go to the employer. And that's what they use to investigate your facts and also to pay you money. So the affidavit is king. So the next thing you want to do is compare your treatment before and after the complaint. It's a retaliation complaint, so retaliation at work works like this. You complain about anything that you believe in good faith is illegal. Now, complaining about a boss who's bullying you potentially could be a good faith belief that you're being discriminated against. Or if you complain about the protected activities of like, or status of like, you know, you're a woman, you're getting discriminated because of sex, or age, you're getting discriminated because you're older, and you're making these complaints to a manager, to HR, to the CEO. These are all activities to complain about something, and you believe in good faith that what you're complaining about is true. And that's all you need to do. You could be completely wrong, and that's okay because the law does protect you. The law's not going to say, well, you are wrong, so this you're not going to be able to collect on any damages. That's not how it works. We're looking for the compare and contrast of before, how you're treated before, star player, never great reviews every year, exceeding expectations, and then suddenly the complaint happens multiple times to HR because it just the behavior, whatever it was, didn't stop and you complained. And then you look at the behavior by the employer afterwards, by the manager, after your complaint was made. That compare and contrast is what we need to capture in your journal, your log. And know that the protected activity includes talking to HR, of course. They're not your friends. We always say that. HR is there to protect the employer. You can also engage in protected activity by sending an email. I think that's probably the simplistic way of doing it. It's like, uh dear so-and-so, I believe I've been subject to discrimination and because of whatever events, and you put it in the writing in an email timestamp, and the employer is going to back it up, they can't erase it. You make a copy for yourself. And you can even also complain, let's say, for example, to the EEOC. They have a portal. You can actually register and lodge a complaint right on their portal at eeoc.gov and encourage you to check out their websites. Very straightforward. It's also kind of a little antiquated, but if you ask me, but uh nonetheless, it's a portal you can report and you want to report and then send a copy of whatever you complain about to your employer in an email. Again, everything's done by email. So you're time stamping things. Now, the next thing is to get legal advice before you do anything, because before you even complain, just talk with an attorney, get a consultation, figure out, you know, what what are you dealing with? Sometimes attorneys, employment attorneys will look at your situation well in advance of you doing a thing to ensure that maybe you get the steps right so you don't screw up your case. It happens a lot. I'm just gonna note this out there if you're using AI to develop your case, be very, very careful that everything you put out there is public. You're not communicating to some attorney client privilege situation. As attorneys, we actually have our own called sandbox where it's not public and it's designed to preserve the attorney client privilege communications. The AI out there is informative. Use it as educational, but when you report and work with an attorney, write your own set of facts. Don't let AI do it for you because it could be wrong. It could be it's also being put out there publicly. So people don't understand this. Other people can look at it in the future, potentially, if they search for it. I don't know how that is, but that's the way things go. So when you're getting legal advice about your claim, either before or during the process of getting retaliated, uh, the lawyer is going to basically speak to you about what your rights of retaliation at work are and go through the steps of how to build a case. Essentially, you're going to be severed, fired by the employer, just a matter of when. So I think of retaliation at work claims when you file them as they're they're basically insurance policies. They help you stay employed for two months or so until the employer starts to crack down on you. Once you report, nothing happens. And they're not going to give you the explanation of their investigation. None of that's going to happen. So don't waste your time thinking or stressing about it. Just reporting the act itself insulates you. If the employer wants to fire you, great. Easy claim to prove. Looking at the proximity of time between the date you complain and something else happened to you. It's some harm, not significant harm. Some harm is now the standard by the U.S. Supreme Court, not significant harm. Determination is a significant harm, but some harm could be, you know, you're not allowed to, as the Supreme Court case had, you're not allowed to use that special car for work anymore. That was some harm. Or you were reporting to an office of that unit otherwise a desk duty, or you got a bad performance review. Some harm has experienced, you know, a differentiation of your work status, whatever it may be. So we're looking for examples of some harm that occurred to you when you talk about retaliation at work. An attorney can spot that out and build a case for you to develop the leverage you're going to need to essentially argue. And then please be mindful when you report retaliation at work, get prepared to look for another job somewhere else. Because once you basically shame the employer with their bad behavior in your good faith belief that something happened, they're going to put a big sign on the back of you and they're going to alienate you and just get ready for it. It does happen all the time. How dare you? You know, what really is happening is the employer is reacting in a very defensive way by these behaviors to cold shoulder you or isolate you because they're freaked out. Like, you know, somebody complain about it because, you know, when you're retaliating at work, retaliation is essentially the act by the employer to do something against you. You're policing the employer and they don't like it. And employers behave badly all the time, probably because they're run bad management or they just can't control that many employees that they try. HR tries, but you know, why does it happen all the time? Because people are, they're, you know, just humans and they screw up and they make mistakes and they have biases and they they they bring those biases to work. So I count on all these things happening because I'm looking for those patterns of behavior. And you should too look for patterns of behavior of managers and how they act when you're building your case of retaliation. So really take a hard look at what you're looking for, you're dealing with with retaliation at work claims and speak to an attorney, develop your facts. We actually have something of value for you. If you're new to the podcast or you've seen the podcast, we put out real cases, real cases from public courts decisions, and they're they're done in AI, meaning two voice voiceovers. But the point is that they're explaining topics to you in a way for you to understand, so you can get educated when you're developing your case, whether it's pregnancy discrimination or it's retaliation in this instance, or it's age discrimination. We have cases that you can listen to. It's a drama, you can, you know, it's a beginning, middle, and end. You can hear the whole story. Sometimes it's oftentimes it's a story where the court allows the case to continue to go to trial, and that's a really a win. You need to understand that because in that decision, it really explains how retaliation works in its fundamental ways so you can understand it to protect yourself. So listening to the podcast episodes, it's there for a reason. I put it there for you to understand how to build your cases. And there's tons of cases out there I can record. I do it all the time, probably, I don't know, so listen to podcast episodes about particular claims, they really are beneficial. It's the whole purpose of this podcast to help you. So thank you for letting me be a service, talking about retaliation at work today. Have a great week.