Most employers are familiar with the anti-retaliation provisions
of their state's anti-discrimination statutes and Title VII
under federal law. These laws create robust rights of action for
current and former employees who allege they were retaliated
against for complaining of discrimination or harassment in the
workplace. They also carry with them the threat of hefty damages
verdicts for employees, and awards of attorneys' fees that
sometimes dwarf the sum of the damages themselves.
Fortunately for employer-defendants, the scope of the
anti-retaliation protections under these statutes is limited by the
scope of the statutes' coverage themselves, in that they
apply specifically to retaliation claims arising out of complaints
about discriminatory or harassing behavior. However,
plaintiffs' employment litigators have discovered that in
many states, there is a way to avoid those limitations and to
expand whistleblower retaliation litigation to include a larger
universe
