Working on campus while a student can make terrific good sense. Foregone income is a large hidden cost of college or university education. Every year spent in school without working is a year of lost earnings. Working while in school can thus defray the largest hidden cost of higher education. Working on campus can not only be convenient but also promote helpful school relationships.
Yet, no one wants to work in a harassing environment. Working in a hostile campus work environment can destroy your peace of mind, mental health, and spirit. That's why federal and state employment laws and campus conduct policies protect you, as a school employee, against hostile work environments. The Lento Law Firm's Student Defense Team can help you stop and correct a hostile campus work environment, including potential monetary damages. Call 888.535.3686 now or use our contact form to tell us about your case.
Your School's Duty to Prevent Hostile Work Environments
The college or university you attend, and where you work, has the legal duty to prevent and remedy hostile work environments. Federal and state anti-discrimination laws prohibit an employer from discriminating based on race, sex, religion, age, disability, and other protected characteristics. Legislatures, backed by courts and agencies, have extended those anti-discrimination laws beyond the obvious failure or refusal to hire, employ, pay, and promote employees based on protected characteristics. The anti-discrimination laws also prohibit employers from creating or allowing work environments that are hostile to an employee's protected characteristic, especially but not exclusive to sex or race. In short, if your supervisor or coworkers are making unwanted sexual advances or sexual or racial jokes, slurs, and innuendo in ways that offend you, you may well be entitled to school relief and even a monetary damages award. We can help you invoke anti-discrimination laws and school procedures for that relief.
How Hostile Work Environments Can Impact You
Work can be hard. Sometimes, you just have to toughen up. But no workplace should be hard because of a sexually or racially hostile environment. Don't underestimate the impact on you of a hostile work environment. You shouldn't have to try to shrug off sexual images and advances or racial slurs and epithets. You shouldn't have to view pornography or other offensive sexual images displayed in the workplace or have others mock or ridicule your sex, skin color, or other attributes associated with sex, race, ethnicity, or disability. Those kinds of scurrilous offenses can not only discourage and degrade you but also depress and oppress you. College or university studies are hard enough without needing to work. They are certainly too hard to put up with a hostile work environment on top of it. Don't let a hostile work environment cause you to quit working or, worse, quit school. Get our help now.
Defining a Hostile Work Environment
Some work is naturally stressful. Perhaps all work has something difficult about it. You may experience petty annoyances and frustrations in your campus job. You may not like your supervisor or coworkers, or you may experience trouble dealing with customers, even other students whom you serve in your campus role. Every employee deals with something. An unlawfully hostile work environment generally requires more than a series of petty offenses or even a one-time insult. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) enforcement guidelines for Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which is the primary workplace anti-discrimination law, hold that to qualify as a hostile work environment, your job must expose you to unwelcome conduct implicating your sex, race, or other protected characteristic. That unwelcome conduct must also be severe or pervasive enough that reasonable persons, not just overly sensitive workers, would consider the workplace to be intimidating, hostile, or abusive. Let us help you evaluate whether you have a hostile work environment claim to pursue against your school.
Unwelcome Conduct in a Hostile Work Environment
Workplaces can grow hostile in a variety of offensive, intimidating, and abusive ways. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) enforcement guidelines provide these illustrative examples, any one or combination of which could give rise to a hostile work environment if severe enough or if pervasive, meaning frequent and continuing:
- offensive jokes, even if the person making them intends them to be humorous rather than malicious;
- slurs, epithets, and other name-calling, where the person intends to demean the person or group they describe;
- physical assaults such as shoving, slapping, tripping, spitting, pulling hair, or even offensive touching;
- threats against person or property, or similar intimidation, intending to oppress, demean, and control the victim;
- ridicule, mockery, insults, or put-downs, even if not threatening physical harm or property loss or damage;
- offensive objects, images, or video, embarrassing or degrading in their content and purpose; and
- interference with work performance, whether undoing work already completed, hiding work tools, or other chicanery in a targeted manner.
The Nexus or Animus Requirement
To qualify for a hostile work environment, these actions must connect in some manner with the victim's race, religion, sex, or other protected attributes. Politically offensive jokes or images may not qualify, just as mocking or ridiculing work performance without reference to a protected characteristic may also not qualify. Some supervisors and coworkers are simply insensitive and even harassing without targeting protected characteristics. But often, harassment of one kind bleeds over into harassment based on one or more protected attributes. The more the perpetrator repeats and prolongs the unwelcome conduct, the more likely the workplace is unlawfully hostile. Let our attorneys help you evaluate your rights and claims.
Who May Bring a Hostile Work Environment Charge
If you are a student teaching assistant or research assistant in a classroom, or lab assistant in a clinical setting, you could experience a hostile work environment in those academic settings. But your college or university employer owes you a duty to prevent a hostile work environment, not just in academic settings but in any setting in which you work. If, for instance, you work as a dormitory resident assistant or in a dining hall or other food service, your school employer should be protecting you from a hostile work environment in those residential or residence-like settings. That duty would include protecting you against abusive and intimidating students, not just work supervisors or coworkers.
If you work in a school recreational facility, pool, sports arena or stadium, bookstore or other retail outlet, or other service capacity, your school employer owes you the duty to protect you against a hostile work environment in those settings, too. If you work in a grounds, custodial, or operations capacity, the school's duty to protect you against a hostile work environment extends to those workplaces, too. And if you work in a registrar's office, student advising office, library, or other support setting, the school should be protecting you against a hostile work environment in those settings, too. Keep in mind that the perpetrator of the wrongs may be a professor, instructor, student, work supervisor, coworker, or customer. Your school owes you a duty to prevent a hostile work environment, no matter whose unwelcome conduct is causing or contributing to that wrong.
Hostile Work Environment Recovery Procedures
Student Disciplinary Procedures for a Hostile Campus Work Environment
When you face a hostile work environment due to the misconduct of other students, your college or university may determine to bring disciplinary charges against the responsible students under a student code of conduct code. The Student Code of Conduct at the University of Florida provides an example of prohibiting students from disrupting school employment. If the hostile work environment involves unwelcome sexual advances and other sexual misconduct, your school may bring student disciplinary charges under your school's Title IX policy. These student conduct codes authorize disciplinary charges, hearings, and sanctions against the student perpetrators.
Student disciplinary procedures will often also provide clear protections for you, the victim student, not just discipline for the student committing the wrong. Those protections may include no-contact orders or loss of privileges, barring the student perpetrator from your campus workplace. Student disciplinary procedures may even provide you, the victim, with restitution for out-of-pocket losses the student perpetrator caused you, such as damaged or destroyed personal items or even mental health counseling or other medical expenses. We can help you determine whether student disciplinary procedures are an appropriate avenue for your relief.
Employer Corrective Procedures for a Hostile Campus Work Environment
Whether or not the perpetrator of your workplace wrong is a student, your college or university employer should have other employment policies we can help you invoke to address and correct your hostile work environment. The Ohio State University's Student Employment Policy is an example, requiring student workers to bring their complaints of harassment in the workplace forward to the Office of Institutional Equity. The advantage of bringing your hostile work environment complaint forward through employment channels, rather than student disciplinary channels, is that your school employer should more clearly see the need to provide you with appropriate workplace relief, potentially including the monetary damages that the law authorizes in certain cases. The focus isn't on disciplining the wrongdoer student. The focus is on correcting the unlawful workplace.
Court Procedures to Address a Hostile Campus Work Environment
Our attorneys can also help you with the administrative agency and court filings that may be necessary to prove your hostile work environment claim, end your harassment, and gain you appropriate monetary relief. You should not be concerned about pursuing administrative or court relief. Title VII and other anti-discrimination laws prohibit your school employer from retaliating against you. If your school employer does not provide you with prompt and complete relief, let us help take the matter to court as necessary.
Money Damage Claims for a Hostile Work Environment
EEOC enforcement guidelines and abundant other federal and state laws make clear that student employees facing a hostile campus work environment can, in certain instances, hold their school employer liable for monetary the unlawful work environment caused. Title VII and other anti-discrimination laws hold employers responsible for promptly stopping and correcting a hostile work environment when employees report it. Money damages may not be due if your school employer was unaware of the unlawfully hostile workplace and promptly corrected it when notified. But if a work supervisor was involved in the harassment, or your school employer did not promptly address and stop the misconduct when notified, your school may have to pay you money damages. Our attorneys can help you evaluate whether your school employer owes you compensation for its hostile work environment.
Types of Money Damages Due for a Hostile Work Environment
If your school employer is liable, then it may have to compensate you not only for your out-of-pocket, economic losses like lost work hours or medical or counseling expenses you incur. Your school employer may also have to compensate you for non-economic damages, including your mental and emotional distress, embarrassment, fear, fright, shock, mortification, and lost enjoyment of life. These non-economic damages may be significantly higher than any economic loss you suffered. Our attorneys can help you evaluate and pursue your money damages claim.
Adjudicating Hostile Work Environment Claims
Hostile work environment claims can be surprisingly difficult to prove. Because these cases tend to involve things said and done that do not result directly in physical injury or even property damage, adjudicating these cases can involve disagreements over who said what to whom and when. You may be surprised to see others lie, denying that they perpetrated or even saw or heard the harassing conduct. Your damages may be equally challenging to prove, absent hospital or other medical records. These cases tend not to be nearly as straightforward, for instance, as a motor vehicle accident claim.
But saying so does not in any way mean that you should not pursue your claim. It just goes to say that you need skilled and experienced counsel. Our premier attorneys know how to investigate, evaluate, pursue, and prove these special claims. They also know the school procedures and court procedures to invoke. Don't retain unqualified local criminal defense counsel, civil litigators, or other lawyers who lack the necessary knowledge, skill, and experience. Instead, let us help.
Special Relief from Hostile Work Environments
If you have already complained through your school's formal student disciplinary procedures and employment procedures without relief, let us help you seek review with the school's general counsel office or outside retained counsel. Colleges and universities typically maintain oversight offices to reduce their regulatory and litigation risks. Our attorneys have the national reputation and relationships to work well with school oversight officials for alternative special relief. We may be able to help you even if others at your school have already refused.
Premier Representation for Hostile Work Environment Claims
The Lento Law Firm's Student Defense Team is available nationwide to help you pursue a hostile work environment claim. Our attorneys have helped hundreds of students nationwide gain effective relief from hostile work environments and other school issues. Call 888.535.3686 now or use our contact form to tell us about your case.
