Opinion ID: 895233
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Preemption of the Common-Law Claim

Text: Waffle House contends, in addition to other arguments we do not reach, that Williams' negligent supervision and retention claim should fail as a matter of law because the TCHRA is the exclusive remedy for workplace sexual harassment in this case. We agree.
Williams argues that Waffle House did not preserve the exclusive-remedy argument in the courts below. The issue was preserved. In the trial court, Waffle House argued in its motions for new trial and for judgment notwithstanding the verdict that Williams' common-law claim failed because Chapter 21 provided the exclusive statutory remedy for the complained-of conduct. [8] Because the issue presented a pure legal question which did not affect the jury's role as fact finder, the post-verdict motion was sufficient to preserve error. [9] This issue was also raised, if not extensively, in the court of appeals. [10] Waffle House also addresses the issue in this Court, quoting Gonzales v. Willis : if we allowed a sexual harassment finding to supply the basis for recovery on a negligent hiring claim, the statutory procedures and limitations applicable to such claims would be rendered superfluous. [11] The issue is more fully addressed in Waffle House's post-submission brief, which includes a discussion of City of Waco v. Lopez , [12] a relevant case decided after the initial briefing to us.
On this record, Williams' exclusive remedy against Waffle House is her statutory harassment claim. We have recognized that the legislative creation of a statutory remedy is not presumed to displace common-law remedies. To the contrary, abrogation of common-law claims is disfavored. [13] However, we will construe the enactment of a statutory cause of action as abrogating a common-law claim if there exists a clear repugnance between the two causes of action. [14] The issue before us is not whether Williams has a cause of action for battery against Davis, her coworker. Although trivial, everyday physical contacts do not necessarily result in a battery, [15] offensive contacts, or those which are contrary to all good manners, need not be tolerated. [16] Hence, [t]aking indecent liberties with a person is of course a battery. [17] Neither side questions the jury's finding that Davis assaulted Williams. The issue before us, however, is not whether Williams has a viable tort claim against a coworker. The issue is whether a common-law negligence action should lie against her employer for allowing the coworker's tortious or criminal conduct to occur, or whether, instead, a statutory regime comprehensively addressing employer-employee relations in this context should exclusively govern. We have recognized generally that employers have a duty to use ordinary care in providing a safe work place. [18] However, Texas courts have also held that the exclusive statutory workers' compensation scheme sometimes provides the remedy against an employer for the assault on [19] or sexual harassment of [20] an employee. Today's question is whether employer liability for unwanted sexual touching by a coworker (simple assault under Texas law given its offensive or provocative nature) is limited to a tailored TCHRA scheme that specifically covers employer liability for sexual harassment. We think the answer should be yes. Davis did not cause damage to the physical structure of the body that would fall within the workers' compensation definition of injury. [21] His conduct was assaultive because of the sexually offensive and provocative nature of his verbal and physical contacts with Williams. Williams could have and did pursue a TCHRA sexual-harassment claim for this behavior. Her common-law claim for negligent supervision and retention was predicated on the same conduct that underlay her TCHRA claim. As Williams acknowledges in her brief: The offensive threats and offensive touching were both an assault and sexual harassment, as found by the jury. A common-law claim for sexual harassment does not exist under Texas law. [22] However, a statutory harassment claim exists under the TCHRA. One express purpose of the state Act is to provide for the execution of the policies of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its subsequent amendments. [23] Sexual harassment is a recognized cause of action under Title VII and the TCHRA, [24] and Texas courts look to analogous federal law in applying the state Act. [25] There are two general types of sexual harassment: quid pro quo and hostile work environment. [26] Williams alleged the latter. Like the workers' compensation scheme, a statutory claim of sexual harassment encompasses a unique set of substantive rules and procedures. Williams obtained favorable jury findings on her TCHRA claim, but elected to recover on her common-law claim. She argues she should be able recover for negligent supervision and retention by Waffle House since she proved an underlying assault by Davis and met the other elements of the common-law cause of action. [27] But allowing Williams to recover on her tort claim would collide with the elaborately crafted statutory scheme, a scheme that, as with the workers' compensation regime, [28] incorporates a legislative attempt to balance various interests and concerns of employees and employers. The differences between a general common-law claim for negligence and a specific statutory claim for harassment are manifold: Administrative Review. Unlike a common-law negligence action, a TCHRA action requires an exhaustion of administrative remedies that begins by filing a complaint with the Texas Workforce Commission civil rights division (Commission). [29] Alternative dispute resolution is encouraged to resolve disputes arising under the TCHRA, [30] and the Commission and must endeavor to eliminate the alleged unlawful employment practice by informal methods of conference, conciliation, and persuasion. [31] These procedures are an essential feature of the statutory framework, as we explained in Schroeder v. Texas Iron Works, Inc .: Construing the CHRA to require exhaustion is consistent with its purpose to provide for the execution of the policies embodied in Title VII. Those policies include administrative procedures involving informal conference, conciliation and persuasion, as well as judicial review of administrative action. Another important policy of Title VII is exhaustion of administrative remedies prior to litigation. [32] The administrative phase also requires the Commission to investigate the employee's complaint and make an initial determination as to whether a violation of law occurred. [33] These extensive investigation and resolution procedures are designed to favor conciliation over litigation.... [34] This meticulous legislative design is circumvented when a plaintiff brings a common-law cause of action for conduct that is actionable under the TCHRA. Limitations. The common-law and statutory causes of action both have a two-year statute of limitations, but the timetable under the two regimes is different in two respects. First, a TCHRA complainant must first bring an administrative complaint within 180 days of the date the alleged unlawful practice occurred. [35] Second, the two-year period for bringing a court action under the TCHRA runs from the date the administrative complaint is filed, [36] while the general statute of limitations applicable to personal-injury actions requires that suit be brought not later than two years after the day the cause of action accrues. [37] Substantive Elements of Claim. To make out a statutory sexual-harassment claim, the employee must prove more than that she found the harassment offensive. The TCHRA contemplates discrimination affecting the terms, conditions, or privileges of employment. [38] Williams alleged and obtained a jury finding that she was constructively discharged. A constructive discharge qualifies as an adverse personnel action under the TCHRA, but requires proof that the employer made the working conditions so intolerable that a reasonable person would feel compelled to resign. [39] Alternatively, the plaintiff can show that she remained in her position and endured a hostile work environment, but must show discriminatory conduct sufficiently severe or pervasive to alter the conditions of the victim's employment and create an abusive working environment. [40] An abusive environment can arise [w]hen the workplace is permeated with `discriminatory intimidation, ridicule, and insult.' [41] Courts look to all the circumstances in determining whether a hostile work environment exists, including the frequency of the discriminatory conduct and whether it unreasonably interfered with the employee's work performance. [42] All of the sexual hostile environment cases decided by the [United States] Supreme Court have involved patterns or allegations of extensive, longlasting, unredressed, and uninhibited sexual threats or conduct that permeated the plaintiffs' work environment. [43] Accordingly, single incidents should not be viewed in isolation because it is the cumulative effect of all offensive behavior that creates the work environment. [44] In contrast, the jury in this case could find, under the charge given, negligent supervision or retention by Waffle House if it found, among other elements, an underlying assault by Davis requiring no more than a physical contact that Davis knew would be regarded as offensive or provocative. The jury was not required to find that Davis' assault created a hostile work environment or imposed such intolerable conditions that a reasonable person would feel compelled to quit. Affirmative Defense. Courts have developed unique standards for the employer's response to a statutory sexual-harassment complaint: For example, federal and Texas courts have recognized an affirmative defense available to employers facing hostile work environment claims when the employer (1) exercised reasonable care to prevent and correct promptly the harassing behavior and (2) the employee unreasonably failed to take advantage of any preventive or corrective opportunities provided by the employer or to avoid harm otherwise. [45] Remedies. The remedies available under the TCHRA are unique. The Act provides for injunctive remedies with no common-law counterpart, such as affirmative injunctive relief requiring the employee to be promoted, restoring union membership, and requiring on-the-job training. [46] Compensatory and punitive damages are available, but these damages are capped at relatively modest amounts that vary with the number of employees. The cap for the sum of compensatory and punitive damages under Act ranges from $50,000 for employers with fewer than 101 employees to $300,000 for employers with more than 500 employees. [47] The compensatory and punitive damages awarded to Williams, $850,000, well exceeded the maximum of $300,000 in combined compensatory and punitive damages available under the TCHRA in suits against the largest employers. Under the Act, the jury's award of past compensatory damages of $400,000 alone exceeded the statutory cap, making punitive damages unavailable to Williams under the statute. [48] In sum, the law governing statutory sexual harassment involves a unique set of standards and procedures. If Williams' common-law claim for negligent supervision and retention is allowed to coexist with the statutory claim, the panoply of special rules applicable to TCHRA claims could be circumvented in any case where the alleged sexual harassment included even the slightest physical contact. In any such case, the plaintiff could claim that a physical contact, even if not actionable as statutory sexual harassment, and even if not normally actionable as a common-law battery, [49] was offensive or provocative because it occurred in the context and course of the coworker's sexual harassment of the plaintiff. The statutory requirements of exhaustion of administrative remedies and the purposes behind the administrative phase of proceedings, the relatively short statute of limitations, the limits on compensatory and punitive damages, the requirement that the plaintiff prove an abusive working environment, and all other special rules and procedures governing the statutory sexual-harassment claim could be evaded in any case where any physical contact between the plaintiff and the coworker occurred.
Our decision is consistent with, though not compelled by, two of our recent decisions. In City of Waco v. Lopez , [50] we held that an employee claiming he was terminated in retaliation for complaining of age and race discrimination could not bring a claim under the Whistleblower Act. [51] Instead, we held the TCHRA was his exclusive remedy because it provided a more specific and tailored remedy. [52] To hold otherwise, we reasoned, would allow a plaintiff to skirt the TCHRA's detailed substantive and procedural provisions. As in Lopez, Williams' common-law claim falls squarely within the CHRA's ambit, [53] that Act implements a comprehensive administrative regime, and affords carefully constructed remedies, [54] and allowing the alternative remedy would render the limitations in the CHRA utterly meaningless [55] and defeat the CHRA's comprehensive statutory scheme. [56] As with permitting a Whistleblower Act claim, permitting a common-law claim for negligent supervision and retention would allow plaintiffs to pick and choose among irreconcilable and inconsistent regimes, [57] one specific and one more general, the result being that employees would have little incentive to submit to the administrative process the Legislature considered necessary to help remedy discrimination in the workplace. Such a result would frustrate clear legislative intent. [58] While Lopez considered whether another statutory remedy would thwart the TCHRA, similar concerns exist if a plaintiff is permitted to pursue a common-law remedy in lieu of the Legislature's tailored and balanced statutory scheme. In Hoffmann-La Roche Inc. v. Zeltwanger , we held that a common-law claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress was not available to an employee complaining of sexual harassment by a supervisor. [59] We held that if the gravamen of the plaintiff's complaint is for sexual harassment, the plaintiff must proceed solely under a statutory claim unless there are additional facts, unrelated to sexual harassment, to support an independent tort claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress. [60] We concluded that the plaintiff's common-law tort claim was not independent of her sexual harassment claim, [61] and that [b]ecause the CHRA provides a remedy for the same emotional damages caused by essentially the same actions, there is no remedial gap in this case and thus no support for the award of damages under the intentional-infliction claim. [62] Zeltwanger is consistent with our decision today. Williams' common-law claim is not unrelated to or independent of her statutory claim; they are both based on the same course of conduct. The unwanted sexual touching that underlies her negligence claim was assaultive because Williams regarded it as sexually inappropriate, provocative, and offensivethat is, because it amounted to sexual harassment made unlawful by the TCHRA. Zeltwanger recognized that the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress was judicially created as a gap-filler tort to provide a remedy where other traditional remedies are not available. [63] However, essential reasoning of Zeltwanger is equally applicable here. The Court was unwilling to allow a duplicative common-law tort recovery because it would undermine the limitations placed on the legislative remedy directed at the same conduct: [T]he tort should not be extended to thwart legislative limitations on statutory claims for mental anguish and punitive damages. By combining her sexual harassment claim with the intentional-infliction tort, Zeltwanger has circumvented, by more than thirty-fold, the legislative determination of the maximum amount that a defendant should pay for this type of conduct. In creating the new tort, we never intended that it be used to evade legislatively-imposed limitations on statutory claims.... If the gravamen of a plaintiff's complaint is the type of wrong that the statutory remedy was meant to cover, a plaintiff cannot maintain an intentional infliction claim regardless of whether he or she succeeds on, or even makes, a statutory claim. [64] This reasoning supports today's decision. The gravamen of Williams' complaint is sexual discrimination in the form of a hostile or abusive work environment, a wrong the TCHRA was specifically designed to remedy. Whether viewed from the standpoint of Davis' motivations or his conduct's effect on Williams, the behavior was injurious because it was sexual harassment. Lopez and Zeltwanger do not mandate today's result, but their essential teachings are entirely consistent with it.
The Workers Compensation Act discussed briefly above expressly provides that its remedies for injured workers are exclusive. [65] The exclusivity of the statutory remedy is not as clear-cut in today's case because the TCHRA lacks an express exclusivity provision. However, the exclusivity of the statutory scheme can fairly be implied. [66] The TCHRA does have a provision styled Election of Remedies, which states: A person who has initiated an action in a court of competent jurisdiction or who has an action pending before an administrative agency under other law or an order or ordinance of a political subdivision of this state based on an act that would be an unlawful employment practice under this chapter may not file a complaint under this subchapter [governing administrative proceedings] for the same grievance. [67] This provision does not mandate that all common-law causes of action, no matter how inconsistent with the statutory remedy, are preserved. First, the title of the section carries no weight, as a heading does not limit or expand the meaning of a statute. [68] Second, the provision does not state that all alternative common-law remedies are preserved; it purports to limit relief under the statute rather than preserving or extending relief available under the common law. [69] Third, as we recognized in Lopez, the provision must be read against the backdrop of extensive and overlapping state and federal anti-discrimination statutes. Its obvious purpose, read in this context, is to provide that if a plaintiff files a federal cause of action under Title VII or another federal anti-discrimination statute, or brings a local grievance as expressly allowed under the TCHRA, [70] she cannot bring a duplicative claim under the TCHRA. As Lopez explained: In the realm of employment discrimination litigationwhere federal, state, and local governments individually declare their opposition to unlawful discriminationSection 21.211 merely means a plaintiff cannot file an administrative complaint with the CHRA after having already (1) filed a lawsuit under a federal or local anti-discrimination measure covering the same conduct or (2) begun administrative proceedings with the EEOC or local enforcement entities based on the same conduct. This provision does not manifest a legislative intent that retaliation suits premised on discriminatory conduct by a public employerand thus undeniably covered by the CHRAcan be maintained under the Whistleblower Act instead. Such an interpretation would undermine the CHRA's express purposes. The election of remedies language simply means that a claimant can pursue a remedy for discrimination under federal law or under grievance-redress systems in existence at the local level, but pursuing either of these options precludes later initiating a CHRA complaint. [71] Hence, Section 21.211 does not authorize all common-law causes of action covering the same conduct addressed by the TCHRA, including those that would undermine the Act or render it a dead letter.
In sexual-harassment cases, an employer is entitled to an affirmative defense if it takes prompt remedial action to stop the alleged harassment. Specifically, Waffle House is entitled to a defense if (1) it exercised reasonable care to prevent and promptly correct any sexually harassing behavior, and (2) Williams unreasonably failed to take advantage of any preventive or corrective opportunities provided by Waffle House or to avoid harm otherwise. [72] The jury rejected this statutory affirmative defense. Thus, the target of Williams' common-law negligence claimthe efficacy of Waffle House's response to her harassment allegations and whether the company erred in supervising and retaining Davis after Williams lodged her complaintsis already part of what determines Waffle House's statutory liability under the TCHRA. In this regard, we disagree with the dissent that Williams' negligence claim can legally and factually be separated from her TCHRA claim so as to support a separate common-law cause of action. As detailed above, Davis' conduct was injurious to Williams because it was sexual harassment, not because it caused any independent physical or other injury. The alleged negligence was Waffle House's failure to prevent Davis' harassment, which counted as assault as defined in the jury charge if Williams regarded it as sexually offensive or provocative. Every act of unwanted touching by Davis was also an act of sexual harassment; that is how he intended it, and that is how Williams regarded it. Hence, all the complained-of conduct falls within the TCHRA's prohibition of gender-based discrimination. [73] It must be stressed that the dissent agrees with the Court on an essential principle: the TCHRA is preemptive as to behavior that constitutes sexual harassment. [74] This record shows precisely such behavior sexually crude touching and comments not physical contact rooted in separate, non-harassment facts. Williams repeatedly concedes the intertwined nature of her claims. For example, in responding to Waffle House's motion for new trial, Williams sets out the evidence supporting her negligence claim by relying on evidence of Waffle House's failure to adequately respond to Davis' harassing behavior. [75] In closing argument, Williams' counsel treated the negligence question as integrally related to the TCHRA claim: Well again, that's the same thing.... And, yes, when you keep a harasser on, you are allowing them to continue to harass and to retaliate, so the answer to Question Number 8 is yes. Again, Williams' brief acknowledges: The offensive threats and offensive touching were both an assault and sexual harassment, as found by the jury. In short, another reason to view Williams' TCHRA claim as exclusive rather than cumulative is that the reasonableness of Waffle House's corrective action to curb the harassment is already baked into the TCHRA analysis and a key part of the controlling statutory framework.
A claim that an employer negligently supervised and retained an employee who sexually harassed a coworker transmutes TCHRA-covered harassment into a common-law tort. Sexual harassment as a legal claim is a statutory creation of legislators, not a common-law creation of judges. As Williams' tort claim is grounded on sexual harassment, it would impose liability for failing to prevent a harm not cognizable under Texas common law. Further, recognizing a common-law cause of action in this context would negate the Legislature's carefully balanced and detailed statutory regime applicable to sexual-harassment claims, and effectively repeal the TCHRA in sexual-harassment cases where physical contact occurs. For these and other reasons discussed above, we conclude that Williams' common-law claim for negligent supervision and retention must yield to the Legislature's statutory framework for sexual-harassment claims. Williams' remedy, if any, lies there.