Posted on September 26th, 2019
Below is a complete transcript of this video.
What’s happening, fellow entrepreneurs? It’s John Fagerholm again. Today I wanted to talk about retaliation claims.
There’s a huge uptick in retaliation claims in California because those are the big money claims. Retaliation, discrimination, harassment, especially sexual harassment.
Those are huge. It’s unfortunate, but almost everything is retaliation now, and it’s not that the law says it’s retaliation.
It’s that these attorneys claim everything is retaliation, and then you’ve got to spend a bunch of money as a business owner to prove that you didn’t retaliate. So let me give you some of the things to watch out for just so you know.
One of the most common retaliation claims is when someone files a workers’ comp claim, and then for whatever reason, if either they get fired because of wrongdoing or the business owner scolds them about anything, then suddenly there’s a retaliation claim.
In the context of workers’ comp, it’s called a 132A claim, and fortunately, most of those are settled out with the workers’ comp, but it’s something to look out for simply because your workers’ comp insurance does not cover 132A claims.
That means if they file a 132A claim, not only are you going to have to hire a lawyer separately to defend that but on top of that, you’re going to have to pay out some money that you normally wouldn’t have to pay out just simply in a workers’ comp claim. So a lot of those.
The other one I get quite a bit is somebody that just isn’t a good employee and then they complain about something.
And then even if they get fired for something, for some wrongdoing, then they turn around and claim that it’s retaliation because they complained about a supervisor or they complained about an unsafe condition or something else.
Unfortunately, we’re in an environment where employment claims are very profitable, both profitable to attorneys and profitable to bad employees. My suspicion is that there’s a lot of coaching going on with some of these attorneys and some of these bad employees.
So they will specifically come and complain about something and then start misbehaving and then claim it’s retaliation.
Another big one is when someone gets written up for something. So they get written up and they say … Well, they get written up and let’s say it’s the last and final warning.
They know they’re going to get fired. They know they’re crappy employees. So instead of moving on or doing a better job, what they do then is they complain about something.
Then once they complain about something, it’s impossible to fire them, because it’ll be a retaliation claim.
So anyway, may not specifically be retaliation according to the law, but you’re going to get a retaliation lawsuit.
You’re going to have to spend thousands of dollars trying to defend this thing.
All right. So those are the things to look out for. Until next time, be productive.
