Smita Acharya emigrated from India a few years ago. She is eligible to work in the U.S. and works at Allbetter Insurance Company in the marketing department. She is 41 years old and is eight ½ months pregnant with her third child. As a result of her pregnancy, Smita has been experiencing elevated blood pressure and must put her feet up at least twice a day – she takes her laptop into a conference room and continues to work with her feet up. Her boss told her she can no longer use any conference room in the building for this purpose even though most rooms are free for many hours of the day and Smita is perfectly capable of getting her work done in this fashion.
Smita has had to endure some challenging coworkers while at Allbetter. Several coworkers made disparaging, bigoted remarks about Smita’s religion regularly – (with the full knowledge of management – who did nothing to stop it). One supervisor even made a nasty comment about Smita being pregnant “at her age.”
Smita plans to go out on maternity leave soon for a month. Being the top performer in her marketing team, she applied for a promotion to VP that would begin four months from today. The hiring Senior VP expressed interest in Smita’s candidacy for the position until her interview when it became readily apparent to him that she was pregnant. The hiring senior VP told Smita that they were looking for someone under 40 and that they felt that she may have limited availability due to child-care issues.
Identify and fully describe ALL of the potential claims Smita may have against her employer – identify the acts/laws under which she could bring her claims. What duties has her employer violated, if any, and how could they have acted differently in some of the circumstances outlined above? you must find at least four (4) claims Smita might have against her employer and identify the appropriate statute/act/law she can bring her claim under.
