Miriam Regalado and her fiancé both worked at North American Stainless. In 2003, after Regalado filed a sex discrimination complaint against the company, it fired her fiancé, Thompson, in retaliation. The Supreme Court is now considering whether Title VII gives Thompson the right to sue the company. While the parties disagree on whether Thompson can sue, they agree that Regalado, the one who was being retaliated against, could sue the company for firing her fiancé.
As noted in a previous blog post, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce filed an amicus brief taking a far more extreme position: There was no unlawful retaliation in the first place, because the company never altered the working conditions of the woman who filed the initial complaint. A company is completely within its rights to intimidate its workers by firing the family members of anyone who dares assert their rights under Title VII.
Unfortunately, it turns out that the Chamber is not alone. SCOTUSBlog reports that during oral arguments, Justice Scalia actually chided the company's attorney for acknowledging that a company can't retaliate against an employee for exercising her Title VII rights by firing her fiancé.
Congress specifically wrote a prohibition against retaliation into Title VII to ensure that workers would not be bullied or threatened into surrendering the rights guaranteed by that law. Congress recognized that without this protection, the rest of the statute would be meaningless. The Supreme Court has previously made clear that the primary purpose of the anti-retaliation provision is "[m]aintaining unfettered access to statutory remedial mechanisms."
Perhaps for as long as there have been families, bullies ranging from neighborhood thugs to totalitarian dictators have used the threat of retaliation against loved ones to keep people cowering in fear, afraid to exercise their basic rights. It is hard to imagine a more effective method of neutering Title VII - and keeping American workers too intimidated to exercise their rights.
It is equally hard to imagine that this is not exactly the sort of retaliation that Congress set out to prevent.
No respectable person should support a company's right to keep its workers too terrified to complain when they are illegally discriminated against. Yet that is the position of the corporate titans who run the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. This should give local Chambers another reason to separate themselves from the national organization.