Our New Jersey Harassment Lawyers have handled hundreds of harassment cases throughout New Jersey on behalf of individuals. It is unlawful harassment in New Jersey for your employer to allow age harassment, disability harassment, gender harassment, pregnancy harassment, race harassment, religion harassment, sexual orientation harassment, or certain other legally protected characteristics.
The NJ harassment laws prohibit your employer from firing you, refusing to hire you, demoting you, refusing to promote you, making decisions regarding your compensation, or taking any other employment action against you based on these legally protected characteristics.
Where a harassment and hostile work environment claim involves allegations based on race, gender, sex, age, national origin, disability, religion, sexual orientation, the inquiry under New Jersey's employment laws is whether a reasonable person of your race, gender, sex, age, national origin, disability, religion, sexual orientation or other protected characteristic would consider the workplace harassment made to, or in the presence of, the employee to be sufficiently severe or pervasive to alter the conditions of employment and create a hostile working environment.
When evaluating whether conduct is sufficiently severe or pervasive to create a hostile work environment, the New Jersey courts focus on the harassing conduct, not its effect on the individual or the work environment. That is because neither an individual's subjective response to the harassment, nor a defendant's subjective intent when perpetrating the harassment, is controlling of whether an actionable harassment claim exists. Whether harassing conduct makes a work environment hostile is assessed by use of a reasonable person standard. The New Jersey and New York Courts have adopted that objective standard to provide flexibility so that the definition of “harassment” could reflect evolving community standards.
Thus, “severe or pervasive” conduct must be conduct that would make a reasonable person believe that the conditions of his or her employment are altered and that the working environment is hostile. Making that assessment requires an examination of the totality of the circumstances (rather than considering each incident in isolation, the courts must consider in harassment cases the cumulative effect of the various incidents, bearing in mind that each successive episode has its predecessors, that the impact of the separate incidents may accumulate, and that the work environment created may exceed the sum of the individual episodes.
In determining whether an actionable hostile work environment claim based upon age harassment, disability harassment, gender harassment, pregnancy harassment, race harassment, religion harassment, or sexual orientation harassment, the New Jersey courts look to all the circumstances, including the frequency of the discriminatory and harassing conduct; the severity of the harassing conduct; whether the harassment is physically threatening or humiliating, or a mere offensive utterance; and whether the harassment unreasonably interferes with an employee's work performance.
“Severe or pervasive” conduct which constitutes harassment, therefore, can be established by citing numerous incidents of harassment that, if considered individually, would be insufficiently severe. Viewing incidents solely in isolation fails to account for the cumulative and debilitating effect that harassing conduct can have in the workplace. In most cases, it is the cumulative impact of separate successive incidents that cements the hostile work environment.
Our New Jersey Harassment Lawyers have extensive experience in federal and state trial and appellate courts representing victims of age harassment, disability harassment, gender harassment, pregnancy harassment, race harassment, religion harassment, and sexual orientation harassment.
If you believe that you have been the victim of harassment, please contact our NJ Harassment Lawyers for a free confidential consultation.
