Mitigating Damages Might be the Most Important Duty of Employees Discriminated at Work.

Hi I’m Jonas Urba, I’m a New York employment lawyer here with Employment Law Reality Check. Why is it so important to mitigate damages with employment discrimination claims? Mitigating damages means minimizing them, and it’s all about dollars. Employees have to keep looking for work. The most important thing in mitigating damages is, no matter how you lost your job sometimes you’re forced to quit but that’s a very rare occasion, you still have to keep looking for work. Make sure you keep a notebook. Make sure you apply for as many jobs as you can. And that’s regardless of whether you’re an older employee, whether you’re pregnant, or even if you have a temporary disability and you can’t work for a while. As soon as you’re able to get back to work make sure you’re looking for work. Whether you think you’re gonna get a job or not really doesn’t matter. In this day and age, with remote working, I’ve found that even older employees can often find jobs that are remote and sometimes they even pay better than the old job that an employee had. And damages are all about dollars. The bottom line is that everybody wants to recover emotional distress damages because if you were discriminated at work the chances are pretty good that it was emotionally traumatic. But courts look at wage loss. It all starts which how much money you have lost from either being fired or in rare circumstances being forced to quit. And so the unfortunate thing is that if you don’t have any wage loss, even though the principle of the matter may make you want to go forward, the courts are gonna say if you didn’t lose any wages how could your emotional distress be six figures? Make sure you keep looking for work. Make sure you document your past wage loss damages. If you’re going to pursue emotional distress or punitive damages you need to have some wage loss damages as well. Call some employment lawyers. Call me. I’m Jonas Urba. I serve the entire state of New York and I can be reached at (212) 731-4776. Stay safe. Attorney advertising.

https://dol.ny.gov/news/new-york-state-department-labor-announces-expanded-anti-retaliation-work