Employment Questions
Employment law sets what your employer owes you and what it is not allowed to do to you — the wages that have to be paid, the reasons you cannot legally be fired or punished, and the adjustments you can ask for when a medical condition affects your work.
This area covers the things that go wrong between a worker and an employer: pay that was withheld, clawed back, or never adjusted the way a manager promised; being classified as exempt or as a contractor when the actual work says otherwise; disability and medical conditions that need an accommodation the employer will not give; harassment and discrimination; being fired or written up after reporting something; and the aftermath, including what a former employer tells the next one.
One rule organizes almost all of it. In nearly every state, employment is at will: absent a contract or a union agreement, you can be fired for a good reason, a bad reason, or no reason. Employment law is the list of exceptions to that rule. So the useful question is never whether what happened was unfair — it is whether it fits an exception: a protected characteristic, a protected activity, a promise the law will enforce, or wages the employer already owes and cannot keep.
Two further ideas do most of the remaining work. First, the law comes in layers: federal statutes set a floor, state law is frequently broader and reaches smaller employers, and some cities add more on top. Second, your classification decides which rules reach you at all — an independent contractor sits outside most wage and discrimination protections, and an employee wrongly labeled exempt may be owed overtime for years of work. Disputes over gig-platform pay, and over being forced to burn PTO to cover hours actually worked, are usually classification disputes underneath.
Retaliation deserves its own note, because it is often the stronger claim. If you complained in good faith about conduct you reasonably believed was unlawful — harassment, a safety hazard, discrimination, unpaid wages — the complaint is generally protected even if you turn out to be wrong about the underlying conduct. Timing is evidence: a sudden performance review, a schedule change, or a write-up appearing shortly after a report is exactly the sequence these claims are built from, which is why dates, emails, and copies of your own complaints matter far more than what you can reconstruct from memory months later.
State law is where the concrete numbers live, and they genuinely differ. How fast a final paycheck must issue after a firing versus a resignation, what penalty attaches when it is late, whether accrued PTO must be paid out, what an employer may lawfully deduct from a check, the minimum wage and when overtime starts, which characteristics are protected, whether non-competes are enforceable, and which test decides contractor status — all of these vary by state, and several vary within a state by industry. Whether your state has its own fair-employment agency also changes your federal filing deadline. Treat any specific number you read online as something to confirm for your state, not as an answer.
What to know
The clock on a discrimination or retaliation charge is measured in months, not years
Before most job-discrimination and retaliation claims can go to court, you generally have to file a charge with the EEOC first. The EEOC's general rule is 180 calendar days from the day the discrimination took place, extended to 300 days where a state or local agency enforces a law prohibiting the same kind of discrimination — and for age claims, only a state law, not a local one, triggers the extension. For ongoing harassment the clock runs from the last incident rather than the first. State agencies keep their own filing windows, sometimes shorter than the federal one, so the safe assumption is that waiting costs you the claim.
EEOC, Time Limits for Filing a Charge of Discrimination — source
Unpaid wages run on a completely different clock
A claim for unpaid minimum wage or overtime under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act must generally be commenced within two years after the cause of action accrued, extended to three years for a willful violation. That is separate from — and much longer than — the EEOC charge deadline, so a single termination can produce one claim that is already time-barred and another that is still very much alive. Many states give workers longer periods, add their own penalties for late or withheld pay, and offer an administrative wage-claim process that is faster and cheaper than filing suit.
29 U.S.C. § 255(a) — source
Whether a law protects you at all can turn on your employer's headcount
Title VII, the principal federal anti-discrimination statute, defines a covered employer as one with fifteen or more employees for each working day in twenty or more calendar weeks in the current or preceding calendar year. Other federal statutes use their own thresholds, and a genuinely small employer can fall outside all of them. This is where state law often matters most: many states apply their fair-employment statutes to far smaller employers, so a claim with no federal home may be perfectly viable under state law.
42 U.S.C. § 2000e(b) — source
Your employer generally cannot interrogate you about your health
Under the ADA, an employer may not require a medical examination of an employee, and may not ask whether an employee has a disability or how severe it is, unless the examination or inquiry is shown to be job-related and consistent with business necessity. Repeated questions about whether you are sick or dying are not automatically unlawful, but they are not automatically permissible either — the test is what the job actually requires, not what a manager is curious about. Parallel rules limit who inside the company may see medical information you do choose to provide.
42 U.S.C. § 12112(d)(4)(A) — source
An accommodation request needs no magic words, and a refusal needs a reason
The ADA treats failure to make reasonable accommodations for the known limitations of an otherwise qualified individual with a disability as discrimination, unless the employer can demonstrate that the accommodation would impose an undue hardship on the operation of the business. You do not have to say "ADA" or "reasonable accommodation" to trigger that duty — telling a supervisor that a medical condition is affecting your work and asking for a specific change can be enough. Put it in writing anyway, name the change you need, and keep whatever the employer sends back; an employer that simply never engages with the request stands on much weaker ground than one that proposes an alternative.
42 U.S.C. § 12112(b)(5)(A) — source
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