Most people may feel at some stage in their working life that they are not being fairly treated. However, this is very different from a situation where your work environment is hostile or discriminatory. If you are subjected to verbal comments that you find abusive, or even intimidation that you feel that is based on your race, religion, or gender, among other factors, this could severely impact your ability to perform well in your job. If the discrimination is on-going and serious, you may actually feel that it would be better to leave your job and find a more conducive working environment. In this situation, you may need an employment attorney in Rochester who will be able to discuss the matter with you. Together, you’d be able to decide whether this was serious enough that you’d want to open a case against your employer.
How would you know that you were in a hostile work environment?
One of the first measures that most lawyers use is that of ‘the reasonable person’. For example, you may find something extremely offensive because of past conditioning or experiences, but the majority of people, even those of the same race group and demographic profile as you, wouldn’t consider this abusive. In this situation, you probably wouldn’t have a case. However, if it’s clear that any reasonable person would experience your treatment the same way as you have, your lawyer would be able to advise you as to how to move forward.
What would constitute hostility in the work place?
You would normally find that if there has been only one situation where you felt threatened, or disliked the way you were spoken to, this wouldn’t create a hostile environment. The behavior would need to be from more than one person and would need to have been repeated several times. There is also a fine line between discrimination and harassment and a hostile work environment. Both are usually present in a hostile work environment, but just being discriminated against isn’t enough to automatically classify the environment as hostile. An attorney will often advise you that the harassment will need to be ‘frequent, severe, and pervasive’ before you can call the environment hostile.
