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Chicago Employment Lawyer Blogs

Uche O. Asonye, CPA, JD, founded the Chicago law firm of Asonye & Associates in 1993. His firm concentrates on workplace issues, immigration law, employment, and civil litigation. His practice includes employment contracts, discrimination, workplace harassment issues as well as immigration, with special focus on physicians, health care workers and medical institutions. The firm relies on advanced technology to provide competent and cost effective representation for clients.

Employer Had Duty to Prohibit Employee's Porn Surfing

Doe v. XYC Corp., 2005 WL 3527015 (N.J.Super.A.D. 2005)

In this case, an employee secretly videotaped and photographed his 10-year old daughter in the nude and transmitted the pictures over the Internet through a workplace computer. The employer's network administrator learned that the employee had been accessing what the supervisor believed were pornographic websites. However, he was instructed to discontinue monitoring the employee's internet usage because the employer had a policy prohibiting such monitoring. Upon learning of the publication of the pictures on the internet, the employee's daughter, through her mother, filed suit against her father's employer, claiming that it failed to take appropriate action when it learned that her father was accessing internet pornography at work.

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$10 Million Consent Decree Resolves Racial Harassment Case Against Roadway Express & YRC

September 2010 - Black Dockworkers and Janitors Subjected to Nooses, Racist Graffiti, and Adverse Working Conditions

CHICAGO – Federal Magistrate Judge Susan E. Cox has granted preliminary approval to a $10 million, five-year consent decree in connection with the racial harassment and discrimination lawsuit against Roadway Express and YRC, Inc that had been brought by the EEOC. In addition, the decree enjoins future discrimination at the facilities and requires the appointment of a monitor to oversee its implementation.

In the lawsuit, the EEOC claimed that the company subjected black employees at its Chicago Heights, Ill., and Elk Grove Village, Ill., facilities to a racially hostile working environment and racial discrimination in terms and conditions of employment. Roadway Express operated the facilities until its merger with Yellow Transportation, when the two companies combined operations to form YRC, Inc., in October 2008.

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7th Circuit Rules that Discrimination on the Basis of Sexual Orientation is Illegal

In early April 2017, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago ruled that employer discrimination against an employee's sexual orientation is illegal. In an 8-3 decision, the 7th Circuit held that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 affords the same protections to sexual orientation as it does to sex.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 makes it illegal for employers to discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, color, and sex. For many years, the 7th Circuit understood that Title VII's prohibition on discrimination on the basis of sex excluded sexual orientation. While the Supreme Court of the United States never expressly answered this question, the Supreme Court's recent decisions regarding sex discrimination convinced the 7th Circuit to look at the language of Title VII with fresh and modern eyes.

The Supreme Court's decisions over the last two decades broadly interpreted discrimination on the basis of sex to include interracial marriages, sexual harassment in the workplace (including same-sex sexual harassment in the workplace), and discrimination based on gender or sex stereotyping. The 7th Circuit used the Supreme Court's framework and analysis when reviewing Hively v. Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana.

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