As you are aware, a lawsuit was recently filed by a former employee. The suit against us is being filed under the constructive discharge section of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In essence, the section states that we made working conditions completely intolerable for the employee, through some form of hostility, discrimination, harassment, retaliation, or humiliation (Sommerville, 2007). Said employee quit after our policy change on expanded production floor operation hours. The former employee maintains that we made working conditions intolerable because we would be forcing him or her to work on a religious holy day. The key in this particular case, of course, is that the former employee is alleging religious discrimination …show more content…

Combined, these two cases show that as long as there was a burden to the company as a whole or to other employees, we are in the clear.

Just to make sure we are perfectly set in our case, we need to consider if the employee offered us an alternative that we rejected. If the employee did, we can cite the case of Ansonia Board of Education v Philbrook. The heart of this case is similar to ours, excepting that the employee offered a reasonable alternative to the employer. Very similar to the previous cases, the court sided with the employer. The employer has to make a suggestion of reasonable alternative – it does not have to accept a proposed alternative from the employee.

In summary, if this should go to trial we need to document several things. We need to document when the employee resigned if we were given reason. We need to document any alternatives proposed by the employee and we need to document what alternatives we as a company proposed. Provided we suggested any reasonable alternatives, regardless of whether the employee accepted them (and the employee clearly did not accept them!), then we are in the clear. For this case, legally, we need to make certain we have these items and we can likely either get the case thrown out, based on the legal precedent previously established and sue for our attorney fees. If we choose to just make the case “go away” without