Retaliation
The U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railway Co. v. White (2006) established a definition of retaliation that includes any employer action that could discourage a reasonable employee from making or supporting a charge of harassment or discrimination.
The Court stated that the standard is objective, based on the perspective of a “reasonable worker” but, by necessity, is flexible because the significance of any given act of retaliation is context-specific and may depend upon an employee’s professional and personal situation. The Court gave two examples to clarify that the difference between a “trivial harm” and a “materially adverse” action is context-specific:
a schedule change might be immaterial to most workers but materially adverse to a young mother with school-age children; and a supervisor’s refusal to invite an employee to lunch is usually trivial, except if the lunch is a weekly training session that contributes significantly to the employee’s professional advancement.
A New York Times report on the Supreme Court decision is available to review.