New York Sexual Harassment Lawyer Blog

A New York State Judge in Brooklyn has re-confirmed the broad goals of the New York City Human Rights Law. In Bumpus v. New York City Transit Authority, 18 Misc.3d 1131(A) (N.Y. Feb. 13, 2008), the plaintiff was a transgender woman who had been born anatomically male but lived her life with a female identity. She complained that she had been discriminated against by a New York Transit Authority employee who had harassed her and made “transgender-phobic epithets” to her for a period of approximately 10 minutes.

The court denied the New York Transit Authority’s motion to dismiss the case, reaffirming that “[t]he Human Rights Law affords protection to transgender people in New York City.” The Court noted that “[t]he New York City Human Rights Law was intended to be more protective than the state and Federal counterparts,” and that “[t]he legislative history contemplates that the law be independently construed with the aim of making it the most progressive in the nation.”

In its decision regarding the New York City Human Rights Law, the court relied on the case of Selmanovic v. NYSE Group, a case in which Schwartz & Perry LLP is participating. We remain committed to fighting to ensure that the New York City Human Rights Law remains one of the most stringent and protective human rights laws in the country.

A recent article in The New York Times reported on the increase in complaints of discrimination in the workplace. The article went on to state that, “federal job discrimination complaints by workers against private employers rose by 9% last year, the biggest annual increase since the early 1990s.”

Based on the article, one might reasonably conclude that job discrimination has intensified. Another reasonable conclusion might also be that more individuals who suffer discrimination in the workplace have been able to observe, from their experiences, that those who complain of employment discrimination do not suffer the results of reporting employment discrimination to the same extent they did previously.

There is a reasonable likelihood to believe that it is not necessarily the increase in discriminatory conduct that caused the number of individuals who report employment discrimination to be greater than before. Instead it could be that individuals have learned that reporting discriminatory acts does not necessarily produce retaliation. The strong workplace retaliation laws that our lawmakers have enacted throughout our country have, in large part, effectively protected those who report discrimination from the retaliatory conduct they feared in the past.