New York Employment Lawyer Blog

According to a recent New York Times article, New York City, led by the Department of Consumer Affairs, conducted undercover operations to expose the unlawful behavior of some employment placement agencies in defrauding immigrant workers through national origin discrimination practices.

Violations included forcing workers to sign work contracts in English, even if they did not understand the language, and keeping refunds owed to workers who were not placed through the various agencies.

Discrimination based on national origin goes beyond employment agencies and recent immigrants to the United States. National origin discrimination or race/ethnic discrimination can happen to anyone, whether they are new to the country or have been in the U.S. for many generations.

A recent article in The New York Law Journal discussed that sites such as Facebook and MySpace could potentially lead to employment discrimination cases.

These various social networking sites are chock full of any type of information an employer may use to make a discriminatory employment decision. These sites can easily reveal a person's age, gender, race, religion and sexual orientation. Even photographs of an individual consuming alcohol while not at work, under New York Labor Law 201-d, cannot be used by an employer to affect an employment decision.

These new issues, due to the prevalence of the Internet and other technological innovations, further demonstrate how relevant and ever-evolving the field of employment discrimination law is.

A recent article in The New York Times entitled, "In Bias Test, Shades of Gray," dealt with a study that attempted to measure unconscious racial bias among doctors. While there is much debate over the validity of the study, the findings are quite shocking. The study showed that the doctors who were more “biased” actually treated patients of different races more equally.

The findings show that racial discrimination can be subconscious and oftentimes is perpetuated by people in the same class as their victims. While case law shows that the courts agree that an employment discrimination claim is still valid if the victim is in the same class as the perpetrator, this is the first scientific study aiming to prove that fact.