Depending on the dimensions of your worker comp audit, the state where you're employed, and your profession, you'll be entitled to certain legal protections within the workplace, including:
- the right to not be discriminated against due to your race, national origin, complexion, gender, pregnancy, religion, disability, genetic information, or age (and, in some places, legal status, sexual orientation, gender identity, or other characteristics)
- the right to a workplace free of harassment
- the right to be purchased hours worked: to be paid a minimum of the wage, plus an overtime premium for any hours worked over forty in one week (or, in some places, over eight hours in one day)
- the right to a safe workplace
- the right to require leave to worry for your own or a family member's serious health condition or following the birth or adoption of a toddler, and
- the right to some privacy in personal matters.
Nolo's online articles on employee rights explain these rights intimately. However, once you've got found out that your legal rights may are violated, what do you have to do about it? Here are several steps you'll fancy assert your legal rights.
1. Talk to Your Employer
In many cases, your initiative should be a lecture to your employer. An intelligent discussion can resolve most problems or, at least, get your differences out on the table. Most companies want to remain within the law and avoid legal tangles. Unless you're employed for a very uncaring and antagonistic employer, your situation is presumably the result of an oversight, a misunderstanding, or a scarcity of legal knowledge.
Here are a few tips on how to present your concerns to your employer:
- Know your rights. The more you recognize your rights going into the conversation, the more confident you'll be in presenting your problem. And, if your company is violating the law out of ignorance or accidentally, you'll means what is going on wrong.
- Stick to the facts. Before meeting together with your employer, write a quick summary of the matter and your recommendation for resolving it. It might help to possess someone more objective, like a lover or loved one, review the facts and brainstorm with you about possible solutions. Make sure to not skip any important facts or get anything wrong. Go back through your records to form sure your recollection of dates, figures, and events is accurate.
- Don't be overly emotional. Dealing with a workplace problem is often stressful, but unfounded accusations and emotional outbursts won't assist you to get your point across. If your job is on shaky ground, try to not make things worse by losing your temper. Practice your presentation before time to form sure you'll remain professional and calm.
- Be discreet. Discussions of workplace issues should happen privately. Employment problems are often divisive and upsetting, not just for those involved except for others, too. You don't want to be accused of poisoning the workplace atmosphere or forcing coworkers to require sides. Ask for a meeting to debate your concerns privately with a supervisor or manager.
- Decide the next steps. Before finishing your discussion together with your employer, come to some agreement about what is going to happen next. Will the company investigate the problem? Will your boss ask your coworkers or your supervisor? Will evaluations, job responsibilities, or reporting relationships be changed?
- Follow up. Once you've got spoken to your employer, confirm to remain in-tuned. If your employer promised to research the matter or ask other employees, check back to seek out out the status of these actions. After a couple of weeks have passed, schedule another meeting to debate what progress has been made in resolving your problem -- and what still must be done.
2. Document the Problem
In addition to talking things through together with your employer, protect yourself by documenting the matter. Take notes of key conversations and events, including the time, date, and names of others who were present. Gather documents that may support your side of the story, like company policies, offer letters, performance reviews, memoranda, emails, and other correspondence, and employee handbooks.
Be careful, however, to gather only those documents you've got legitimate access to. Taking or copying confidential documents -- albeit they're associated with your dispute -- could get you fired and will compromise your legal claims. If your coworkers saw or heard any of the incidents that contributed to the matter (such as a verbal performance review, a harassing comment, or an inquiry of your workspace), ask them to write down what they saw and heard in signed, dated statements.
3. Consider Legal Action
If your employer doesn't seem to be taking your complaint seriously, otherwise you are demoted or fired, consider whether to require action. In making this decision, you will need to require an in-depth check of your motives, your evidence, and your willingness to spend the time and money that action requires.
- What results do you want? If you're expecting a multimillion-dollar payday, think again: Although such judgments exist, they're only a few and much between. The overwhelming majority of legal claims never get to trial. If you're angry, seeking revenge, or hoping to point out the planet you were right along, confine mind that emotions like these don't provide a robust basis for a lawsuit -- and will lead you to form poor decisions going forward. If what you would like is comparatively simple (for example, you would like a letter of advice or a retroactive pay raise to the date once you should are promoted), try negotiating with your employer for those things.
- How strong is your case? The success of any legal claim depends on the strength of the evidence. To win, you'll need to show -- with documents, preferably -- that your rights were violated. Strong feelings or suspicions aren't equivalent to evidence. To find out how good your claims are and whether you're likely to win, you ought to consult an experienced employment lawyer.
- Can you afford a lawsuit? Prosecuting legal claims takes tons of your time -- time you would possibly better spend finding and excelling at a replacement job. Lawsuits also cost money. If your case is robust, you'll find a lawyer willing to require it on a contingency basis, during which the lawyer's fees begin of the cash you win. Even so, you'll probably need to pay the prices of bringing the claim along the way, which may be substantial. And that fee might be 25%, 33%, or maybe 40% of what you ultimately collect.
If you opt to travel forward, confirm you meet your legal deadlines. The law sets deadlines (often called "statutes of limitations") for filing certain sorts of claims or lawsuits, starting from several weeks to many years. If one among these deadlines applies to your case, you'll need to think sooner instead of later about whether to travel to court. You might want to consult a lawyer about your problem to work out how strong your claims are, whether any filing deadlines apply to your dispute, and what you might expect to realize or lose if you file a lawsuit.
