By Bert Braud, The Popham Law FirmDiscrimination is real, folks, and it’s on the front pages of the newspaper. We saw its ugliness recently in a St. Louis cemetery (an act copied this week in Philadelphia). Jewish community centers are receiving bomb threats. Our neighbors to the west, in the Kansas City suburb of Olathe, saw
the horror of discrimination in the killing of one man and wounding of another, based solely on the color of their skin.Those incidents didn’t happen on the job, but they are rooted in the evil of discrimination. And the same evil appears in the workplace. I currently represent two African American men who were exposed to a noose hanging at work. My colleagues and I in the National Employment Lawyers Association see it every day.And instead of moving forward, protecting the hard workers of Missouri who just want to do their jobs, the Missouri Legislature is backing up. We should be making it harder to discriminate, not easier!Yesterday, the Missouri Senate began debating SB 43, a bill that makes drastic changes to the Missouri Human Rights Act (the MHRA). For more detail on the specific changes, scroll down the Blogs page at www.pophamlaw.com. Here are the highlights (discrimination comes in many shapes, but I’ll use a job termination of a disabled person in the examples below):
- The burden of proof will be harder. Instead of discrimination contributing to the decision to terminate, the new standard will be that the termination was “because of” the employee’s disability. That means that an employer who can come up with any other reason is not liable for discrimination. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to create a non-discriminatory reason.
- Personal responsibility is gone. The new law would totally excuse the individual wrongdoer, no matter how ugly or vile his conduct. This change protects someone who, for example, mocks or makes fun of a person with a disability.
- Decades old caps on damages – taken from Federal Law – will be imposed on the victims of discrimination. Ironic, isn’t it? Just last week Missouri Senator Will Kraus echoed the sentiment of many in the chamber, when speaking about the Real ID law: “I’m tired of federal overreach.” Apparently, “federal overreach” doesn’t apply here, because in addition to the caps from federal law, the bill wants to make our own State Supreme Court ignore its past decisions and follow decisions from Federal Court instead.
- Whistleblowers – who risk their careers to protect others – can barely recover at all.
When Rod Chapel, President of the Missouri NAACP, testified against a similar bill in the Missouri House on February 13, Committee Chairman Bill Lant cut him off, shutting down his microphone. Rod accurately called the legislation a return to “Jim Crow” laws.Sadly, he’s right. We are backing up. Please contact your representative and tell them we want to move forward, not backwards.
