The New York City Council is considering strengthening the hand of workers looking to bring discrimination or harassment claims against their employers.
A pending proposal would deem unenforceable any employer-worker agreement restricting the time workers have to file such claims. The measure arises as a growing number of employers large and small are using the agreements and effectively limiting their legal exposure.
New York City’s Human Rights Law gives workers one year to file a complaint with the New York City Commission on Human Rights and three years to file a claim in civil court. The Council bill would void “any provision of any agreement purporting to shorten the periods” during which workers can file complaints, according to the text.
“Too many employees have been unknowingly signing away their rights and their protections in contracts that employers are giving to them,” said Councilmember Lincoln Restler, the bill’s sponsor, at a recent hearing held by the Council’s civil and human rights committee. “It is undermining the protections that New Yorkers are guaranteed.”
Restler said employers who have sought to shorten the filing period include Northwell Health, the state’s largest employer. A spokesman for Northwell Health said the health care provider had no comment on the legislation.
Anne Clark, managing partner of the law firm Vladeck, Raskin & Clark, P.C. and a member of the New York affiliate of the Legislative Committee of the National Employment Lawyers Association, said the bill could potentially benefit thousands of city workers.
Currently, she said, some companies require even prospective workers to waive their rights, by inserting clauses in job applications that give would-be workers as few as six months to file claims.
“In essence, the employers are trying to write themselves out of the civil rights laws,” Clark said at a Council hearing last year.
In an email to Gothamist, Clark wrote that six months “is not a lot of time to find an attorney, have the attorney investigate, and prepare papers for filing.”
“The most serious problem is not that it is hard to comply, but that most people do not recall signing such provisions,” she added.
The proposed protections are also designed to help workers who allege gender-based discrimination. During a hearing last year, Gabriela Rendón, a staff attorney at the nonprofit Gender Equality Law Center, noted that “workers often face power imbalances in their relationships with employers,” a problem further compounded by other issues.
“The employee did not read the agreement, did not understand the agreement, or did not know that they were signing such [an] agreement, because it was inconspicuously included in a lengthy and complicated employment application,” she said. “Workers may agree to them in order to secure a job, or because they are not even aware that they could bring a claim against their employer if they are discriminated against."
Representatives of the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce, which represents many employers in the city, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
