When an employee is harassed at work because of his or her race or gender, it is assumed under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that the individual will have the chance to confront the harasser in a courtroom of his or her peers. Yet in the Northern District of Georgia, the victim of harassment almost never gets his or her day in court. In fact, in 2011 and 2012, 100 percent ofracial harassment cases in the District were dismissed by a Judge before they could go to trial, and all but one sexual harassment case were dismissed.
Barrett & Farahany, LLP, LLP, a leading employment law firm in Atlanta, just released the study, “Analysis of Employment Discrimination Claims in Which an Order was Issued on Defendant’s Motion for Summary Judgment in 2011 and 2012 in the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of Georgia.” The study, which identified all 226 filed cases of employment discrimination in the District, was conducted to determine the current rate of dismissal via summary judgment for plaintiffs in employment discrimination cases.
The study mirrors what so many victims of harassment in Northern Georgia encounter – that it is almost impossible to get a jury trial in a workplace discrimination case. Barrett & Farahany, LLP found that among the 181 cases in which plaintiffs were represented, Judges dismissed 94 percent of those cases in some way, and 81% of the cases in full.
Remarked Amanda A. Farahany, partner with Barrett & Farahany, LLP, “The study shines a light on a disturbing trend for civil rights litigants in the federal courts. A jury should be allowed to decide whether a worker’s experience is a hostile work environment, particularly when the employee is groped by a supervisor called the “n-word” by a manager. People have a constitutional right to have their cases decided by their peers, not by one person standing alone.”
The “Analysis of Employment Discrimination Claims” study was conducted in relation to Justice at Work, an ongoing initiative with the primary purpose of protecting litigant’s rights to a trial by a jury of their peers. For a copy of the study, click this link – “Analysis of Employment Discrimination Claims in Which an Order was Issued on Defendant’s Motion for Summary Judgment in 2011 and 2012 in the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of Georgia”.
