Sacramento Employment Lawyer | Arkady Itkin
Effective Representation In Employment and Wrongful Termination Cases for Workers and Businesses
When an employee is sexually harassed at work by a manager, supervisor, or senior executive, the employer may face strict liability under California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA). This means that the employer can be held responsible for the supervisor’s unlawful harassment even if the employer did not know about the misconduct when it Read More …
Winning nearly $1 million in employment damages is a substantial result. Obtaining that award in mandatory arbitration makes it particularly noteworthy: research has found lower employee win rates and smaller awards in that setting than in employment cases tried in court. In a reported California employment arbitration, Ms. Lee obtained $932,550 in economic damages, plus Read More …
Being over 40 and losing your job to a younger employee does not automatically mean that you have a viable age discrimination case. At the same time, employers rarely admit that age played a role in a termination, layoff, demotion, or failure to promote. So how can an employee actually prove age discrimination? Recent California Read More …
Employees often assume that workplace retaliation means being fired shortly after complaining about discrimination, harassment, or another unlawful practice. In reality, retaliation can be much more gradual. An employee complains. Nothing dramatic happens immediately. Instead, the employee begins receiving criticism that did not exist before. Responsibilities are taken away. Important assignments disappear. The employee is Read More …
California employees sometimes assume that pregnancy discrimination laws do not protect them if they work for a very small employer. Employers may make the same assumption. The reason is understandable. California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA), which prohibits discrimination based on sex and pregnancy, generally applies to employers that regularly employ five or more Read More …
A recent $5 million California workplace harassment verdict out of the the Northern District of California illustrates an important point about employment discrimination and harassment cases: the strength of a case often depends not merely on whether illegal conduct occurred, but on the severity of the conduct, the vulnerability of the employee targeted, and the Read More …
Effectively defending against SPB dishonesty charges can make a real difference between being terminated vs saving a state service career. CA Gov. Code sec. 19572(f) identifies dishonesty as grounds for discipline, and state agencies often argue that an employee who has been dishonest can no longer be trusted and therefore must be terminated. A recently Read More …
If you are a California state employee serving a probationary period, you do have important legal rights, which may protect you from being fired during probation. At the same time, those rights are considerably more limited than those enjoyed by employees who have successfully completed probation and obtained permanent status with the State of California Read More …
EERA section 3543.5(a), declares that it shall be “unlawful for a public school employer to impose or threaten to impose reprisals on employees, to discriminate or threaten to discriminate against employees, or otherwise to interfere with, restrain, or coerce employees because of their exercise of rights guaranteed by this chapter.” To establish a prima facie Read More …
One of the biggest mistakes I see small business owners make is using contracts with their customers that do not include a prevailing party attorney’s fees provision. This automatically puts them in a more vulnerable position with someone who, for whatever reason, decides not to pay for their work. Imagine you complete the work, send Read More …