Your career is your livelihood, and when issues in the workplace start interfering with your job, your whole life is affected. Career stability is crucial for maintaining financial stability, and the thought of losing your job over discriminated characteristics, like gender or race, or over generally addressing important problems with your employer can be particularly stressful.
Employment law protections are one of the most important sets of legal proceedings built to keep your job and your income protected from harm. In the Riverside area, the legal team at Clark Employment Law can help you address any grievances with your employer, decide the best strategy for restoring your rights, and move forward in the process towards helping you feel secure at work once more.
Employment law is a branch of legal proceedings that provides protections to individual employees, including the legal proceedings that follow addressing problems with an employer. Ranging from accessibility cases to gender-related discrimination, employment law protections help fight any form of discrimination, harassment, or targeted attacks an employee may face from their employer.
These targeted cases of retaliation – an employer seeking to punish an employee for certain actions or attributes – range from targeted harassment and discrimination to pay decreases, unfair disciplinary actions, and even separation or termination of employment.
Labor law and employment law are areas of the legal field that aim to protect the rights of workers. However, the primary focus area of each field is different. Labor law is the set of legal proceedings that advocate for a group of workers, or a staff team, that goes beyond a single worker.
Labor law protections are often used in establishing, maintaining, and protecting worker-established groups, such as labor unions, and can help facilitate meetings or grievance redressal between the workers, employers, and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
Employment law, on the other hand, is handled on an individual basis, and legal proceedings typically follow a single employee’s case against their employer. Grievance redressal for unfair labor practices, like retaliation for whistleblowing, is covered by both labor law and employment law.
However, the cases taken on in an employment law case handle a singular employee as opposed to a group of employees. For example, if an employee is wrongfully terminated after revealing that she is pregnant to a supervisor, this case would fall into the employment law category, and that employee can then find an employment lawyer to help address the issue in court.
Personal injury claims and worker’s compensation claims, although different, are two other types of claims that can be simultaneously filed with or against an employer as a way to restore any damages lost by these injuries. For example, if you slip and fall on a puddle of condensation from a poorly installed air conditioning unit in your workplace, the worker’s compensation filing for your injury can be done alongside the personal injury claim against the HVAC installer, the third party involved in the incident.
While both claims are injury-based, worker’s compensation is handled by your employer, and the case brought up against the HVAC company would be considered a personal injury suit. Used as a way to cover any outlasting damages caused by your worker’s compensation claim, a personal injury suit can cover payments not taken on by your workplace insurance.
Seeking any kind of action when dealing with workplace issues can be nerve-racking, especially in instances where retaliation is common. Coming out about an experience with sexual harassment, retaliation, or workplace discrimination can cause a rift in your management team, and as the employee, you can be caught in the fallout from these decisions.
Fortunately, the protections provided by state and federal employment laws can help you speak up about these issues and receive the right remedies for rectifying each situation. Some of the biggest areas of employment law include:
Seeking adequate handling and restorative justice for any workplace issue is key to moving past any problems and creating a non-hostile, productive workplace. Speaking up should not be penalized, and you have the right to get your experiences or issues at work handled with the utmost care. As an employee, your rights should not be compromised to save the reputation of your employer and seeking legal counsel to rectify any employment law violations is key to helping you recover from these jarring incidents.
Each employment law case is different, and the level at which each is argued can contribute to the overall price of your legal services. For example, a full-blown wrongful termination suit that has proven violations of different national protections for disability established by the ADA may require a trial court to settle, which can increase your legal fees, whereas smaller claims like pay disparity can be resolved in a mediation meeting.
As with any legal case, the support of a legal team is crucial to restoring justice, especially in a field as imperative as employment law. For incidents regarding employment law, knowing what constitutes legal and illegal in terms of workplace issues is important for seeking further rectification for different issues.
Different employment law firms will charge different amounts of money based on their services, and no two firms are the same in terms of billing. The most important quality needed when searching for a proper employment law attorney is case experience, which can make or break the outcome of your case beyond the price tag.
In addition to counseling employees, compiling documented evidence of different events, and interviewing witnesses, employment law attorneys help workers realize the full scope of their rights, helping create a legal framework for addressing workplace problems. Knowing your legal rights as an employee is crucial for avoiding any major employer-based retaliation for speaking up about workplace issues.
The role of an employment lawyer is to uphold state and national laws regarding employees’ rights in the workplace. Providing crucial guidance on worker’s rights knowledge and addressing grievances, employment lawyers are essential to helping workers have a firm support network when facing retaliation from their employers.
Facing any kind of retaliation in the workplace, especially when it threatens your livelihood, is never an easy battle. Finding a legal team able to equip you with the proper tools to combat these instances while helping you get the compensation you deserve is imperative. At Clark Employment Law, our expert legal services are available to help you restore your violated worker’s rights. Between our expertise in the veiled and wide array of practice areas, we can ensure that your team is here to help. For a full list of our practice areas or more information about our team, visit our website and sign up for a free consultation today.