Downey

Your livelihood is important to you and your family. It can be stressful to get into a heated dispute with your employer about wage and hour, discrimination, harassment, retaliation, or whistleblowing—or some combination of these. You should retain an experienced Downey employment law attorney to counsel and represent you. Whether you have a wage and hour, discrimination, or whistleblowing claim, give Calderone Law Firm a call. We have more than 20 years of experience representing workers in these important lawsuits.

Workplace discrimination occurs when an adverse employment action is taken against an employee due to a characteristic protected under an antidiscrimination law such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) or the California Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA). The adverse employment action could involve failure to hire, failure to promote, demotion, layoffs, unfair write-ups, harassment, and firing. For example, under FEHA, you may have a discrimination claim if you were demoted because you were assigned male at birth and decided to transition to female, and your employer was biased against those that are transgender. Similarly, you may have a claim under FEHA if you are Black and your coworkers used the n-word and put a noose on your desk and otherwise harassed you, but your employer told you to just get over it instead of taking your complaint seriously. FEHA applies to employers that have at least 5 employees. Sexual harassment is prohibited, however, even if an employer has only one employee.

Nonexempt employees in Downey and elsewhere in California receive particular protection under wage and hour laws. Your employer is expected to follow a host of rules regarding minimum wage, overtime, meal and rest breaks, equipment, and uniforms if the law regards you as nonexempt. In some cases, employers misclassify their workers as exempt employees or independent contractors in order to avoid meeting their obligations under federal law; however, whether you are a nonexempt employer is not up to your employer’s preferences. To be considered an exempt employee, more than 50% of your time needs to be spent performing exempt job duties, or else you are a nonexempt employee. Exemptions are for executives, administrative employees (not all of them), professional, computer professionals, salespeople, and artists; in most cases, exempt job duties are those that involve tasks over which you have discretion. Sometimes wage and hour lawsuits involve only a very minor amount of damages; it can be appropriate if the potential damages are small in your individual lawsuit to join with coworkers who are facing similar violations from the same employer to bring a class action lawsuit with the help of experienced class action lawyers such as those at Calderone Law Firm.

California is generally an “at-will” employment state. However, you are protected under the law from being terminated or otherwise retaliated against for reporting illegal activities in your workplace to a government agency, refusing to participate in your employer’s illegal activities, and cooperating with or testifying in government investigations of your employer’s wrongdoing. In other words, the law recognizes that if you are a whistleblower engaged in any of these protected activities, you should not be penalized for them. You have the right to speak up without fear of retaliation such as unfair write-ups, firing, layoffs, demotions, or being passed over for a promotion because you reported your employer in good faith. There are a range of whistleblower lawsuits including qui tam lawsuits, environmental whistleblowing lawsuits, corporate whistleblower lawsuits involving the Sarbanes-Oxley Act or Dodd Frank, and lawsuits that implicate the False Claims Act.

Vincent Calderone and our trustworthy Downey employment lawyers represent employees in employment lawsuits involving discrimination, harassment, retaliation, wage and hour law violations, and whistleblowing. We are firmly committed to serving our clients’ interests and protecting their rights. Call us at (424) 348-8290 or complete our online form.