The North Carolina Retaliatory Employment Discrimination Act, or REDA, protects North Carolina employees from retaliation by their employers. North Carolina employment attorney, Kathryn Abernethy, helps explain REDA and how it protects employees. This is all part of our series with attorney Abernethy focusing on North Carolina employment law. For more videos, click the link here. You can also read her answer in the transcript below.
Transcript: What Is REDA And How Does It Help Employees?
REDA (Retaliation Employment Discrimination Act) is one of the few statutes that we have here in North Carolina that makes me think that state government actually might care even the tiniest bit about employees in the state of North Carolina.
It is basically an anti-retaliation statute that protects employees who assert and stand on their employee rights under North Carolina law.
So, REDA prohibits retaliation when an employee is standing up, for example, their rights under the North Carolina Wage and Hour Act, their rights under state workers compensation laws. One new expansion of REDA is that now if you’re a domestic violence victim and you need up to I believe it’s five days in the statute of sick time to deal with the impacts of domestic violence.
Let’s say your abuser put you in the hospital or you have to get counseling following a following an episode of DV. You now have the right to take those five days off. And if your employer retaliates against you for exercising that right, now you have a right of action under the Retaliatory Employment Discrimination Act.
It is a very strong statute from the perspective that it provides the opportunity for the plaintiff to recover treble that’s TREBLE as in three times damages.
In other words, they don’t just have to pay you for your losses once, they can potentially be made if you meet certain evidentiary standards to pay you 3 times over what your economic losses are.
So that’s a strong incentive for employers not to fool around and violate REDA because it can quickly add up for them in terms of potential liability.
