In the era of corporate downsizing and reorganization, many employees are terminated and faced with the option of signing a waiver of rights in order to receive a severance package. An employee who accepts a package then has 7 days to revoke the acceptance prior to being bound. The idea behind the listing is that the employee can have the list analyzed in order to see if older workers seem to be targeted or disproportionately affected by the program. This law was designed to protect older workers against coercion and duress, such as being forced to sign a waiver of claims immediately upon notice of termination, thereby potentially waiving valuable claims without understanding the ramifications, benefits and detriments of said signing. It is a variety of an informed consent law.
Sexual harassment is a form of gender discrimination.
It is a judicially created legal concept which grew out of the protections against gender discrimination found in laws such as Title VII of the Civil Rights act of 1964. The foregoing definitions are greatly simplified, however, and there is a tremendous amount of case law that specifies in what situations a type of actionable sexual harassment is present, or not present. Being a relatively new legal claim, the law of sexual harassment is still evolving, and the United States Supreme Court as recently as mid-1998 decided important cases in the area of sexual harassment. The issues decided in these cases were previously unresolved among the lower courts, which had issued conflicting opinions on the issues. In one case, Oncale v. Sundowner , the Supreme Court ruled that a male employee may sue under Title VII for sexual harassment by his male co-workers, provided that the circumstances infer the sexual harassment was because of the victim's gender as male.