Retaliation can be subtle or blatant. However, any negative action taken by an employer which is severe enough to deter a reasonable employee from exercising their legal rights is likely to support a legal claim of retaliation. Any adverse change in working conditions might qualify as retaliation.
Demotion: Any employer decision to lessen your status, limit responsibilities, curtail seniority privileges associated with your position, or reduce your salary, commission, or bonus can be evidence of retaliation.
Denied opportunities: When an employer refuses to provide educational benefits, stops funding attendance at conferences and seminars, or suddenly stops paying for travel or membership in a trade or professional organization after an employee files a complaint about workplace conditions, there might be retaliation. Employers might try to hide their intentions by claiming financial reasons for curtailing benefits and opportunities, but the discovery process attendant to an investigation or civil suit can uncover the real motives.
Excessive micromanagement: Suddenly, your work is examined or reviewed by a hostile supervisor who is looking for mistakes and missteps and who is constantly hounding you to go faster, change direction, or removes your authority to act independently.
Salary reductions or loss of hours: Receiving a pay cut, losing regularly scheduled hours, or losing a preferred shift to accommodate family or childcare responsibilities can also be a form of retaliation. These changes can sometimes be quite subtle, surrounded by reasonable-sounding justifications, which are merely covers for retaliation.
Exclusion: Being intentionally kept out of meetings, training, or workplace social events can feel like gaslighting at times, especially when these exclusions are sudden, and work colleagues go silent around you without explanation.
Reassignment: Having your customary responsibilities reassigned to other employees or having your schedule modified to cause undue hardship are other forms of retaliation. Disappearing workplace accommodations to care for family members or children, loss of regularity in shift assignments, or sudden assignment to less favorable shifts that causes you undue hardship is also retaliation.
Bullying or harassment: Sometimes, employers rely on other employees to enforce their displeasure with your complaints and encourage others to bully or harass you at the workplace. These measures can be humiliating and demoralizing as they isolate you from your peers.
Excessive negative job performance reviews: After years of favorable reviews and job promotions, an employer turns on an employee who has complained about any form of workplace discrimination by changing the tone and content of job performance reviews.
Termination: The ultimate form of retaliation is termination, loss of salary and well-being, loss of status, and a blot on your employment record. Termination can be actual or constructive. Actual termination is just being fired, however, constructive termination is when your employer subjects you to intolerable working conditions for the purpose of causing you to resign. Over a course of time, your employer might reprimand you for trivial incidents, write up serial negative job reviews, or engage in a scheme to humiliate you at work among your peers and threaten to terminate you if you don’t resign. The pressure becomes so intense that you are forced to quit, which might be considered constructive termination.
How is workplace retaliation proven?
To successfully prove a claim of workplace retaliation, a complainant must prove:
You were engaged in a protected activity of complaining about workplace discrimination, culture, public health, and safety, or compliance with federal and state laws;
You suffered some form of negative workplace consequences; and
And the adverse employment action was caused by the protected activity.
Employers often defend these actions by fabricating stories about inadequate performance, misdeeds, and incompetence despite those instances having never shown up in previous performance reviews until the retaliation began.