Supreme Court Harassment Investigation Case

In an interesting ruling, the Supreme Court of the United States ("SCOTUS") has made a determination on legal issues surrounding employer retaliation in an internal corporate harassment investigation.

Employees who do not initiate or instigate a harassment complaint, but who merely answer questions asked in the course of an investigation, are as protected against retaliatory actions by the employers, as are those who personally initiate or instigate proceedings.

Previous rulings from the lower 6th Circuit Court and Court of Appeals were flawed when they ruled that federal anti-retaliation law, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, did not protect the plaintiff because she had not "instigated or initiated" the complaint, and instead had merely answered questions in a case already underway.

Justice David H. Souter wrote, in part: "Nothing in the statute requires a freakish rule protecting an employee who reports discrimination on her own initiative but not one who reports the same discrimination in the same words when her boss asks a question".

The ruling was 9 to 0, with no dissenting opinion.

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Prior to this Supreme Court ruling, it would appear that if a Regional Manager from a corporation were to investigate complaints about discrimination in their subsidiary offices or storefronts, they might meet a unified wall of denial in a situation where a manager was organizing (or gave tacit approval to) discrimination. The manager might have made it clear that if any local employee answered any questions in the investigation in a way which supported discrimination claims, they'd be terminated, and have no legal recourse.

Today's ruling makes it clear that there is a legal recourse. The employees can answer truthfully without fear of getting fired, or if they get fired for informing an investigation, they have grounds to successfully sue.