For the Journal Last year, unhappy people filed about 20,000 complaints against their employers charging retaliation. Year by year, the number of such complaints goes up steadily. In 1991, only about 8,000 such claims landed in offices of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. For management, retaliation claims are far more dangerous than those charging plain-vanilla discrimination.
Retaliation is easier to prove and much harder to defend.
Moreover, such claims often anger juries, which respond with large awards of punitive damages. Anti-discrimination law begins with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination for reasons of race, color, creed, ethnicity, gender and later, age, pregnancy and disability. Still, retaliation cases have gained popularity only in recent years. These claims have special characteristics. For example, the boss often believes that unhappy employees must win discrimination cases before they're entitled to damages for retaliation.