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EEOC Settlements & Counter-Offers: Some Tips from Employee to Employee



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Treat my suggestions like you’d treat advice from a co-worker &
PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH!

****** If I’ve left things out that you guys think are important, PLEASE drop your suggestions in the comments!*****

Read these before you discuss settling:
https://www.eeoc.gov/federal-sector/management-directive/chapter-11-remedies
https://www.chuhak.com/37D475/images/stories/PDFs/ch9tecson.pdf

Example counter-offer letter from the Babcock Law Firm: https://www.injurylawcolorado.com/personal-injury-denver/counteroffer-insurance-company/
This is for an insurance claim, but gives SOME idea about how to craft an offer.

Equip for Equality’s Best Practices for Mediation has excellent suggestions on thinking through your demands which is what a counter-offer is about. https://www.equipforequality.org/mediation/
It steps you through the process of preparing for mediation, which is very similar to putting together a counter-offer.

Step 1: Add up your monetary damages
There are a few categories of monetary relief we can ask for. In this video, I go through the major ones and some considerations you should think through.
- Back pay
https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/pay-salary/back-pay-calculation

OPM Back Pay Calculator - https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/back-pay-calculator/
- Front pay
- Reinstatement
Sample reinstatement agreement to give you some idea of what’s involved https://www.profit-advantage.com/documents/reinstatementform.pdf

It’s going to be virtually impossible to justify both front pay and reinstatement. Sources:
https://elawlines.com/2013/07/01/employment-discrimination-reinstatement-vs-front-pay
https://lewisbrisbois.com/blog/category/labor-employment/reinstatement-is-back-on-the-menu

Step 2: Add up your compensatory damages
http://eeo21.com/files/Compensatory_damages.pdf
https://www.eeoc.gov/remedies-employment-discrimination
https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/enforcement-guidance-compensatory-and-punitive-damages-available-under-sec-102-cra
https://www.fedweek.com/issue-briefs/eeoc-summarizes-types-of-relief-it-may-order/
https://www.equipforequality.org/remedies-under-the-ada/

Pecuniary damages let us recover any monetary expenses we had a a result of the discrimination. Non-pecuniary damages is monetary compensation for harm that was non-monetary. There are caps on the amount of Non-pecuniary Damages we can recover. Another video of mine about Non-Pecuniary Harm:
https://youtu.be/L1BhBcaIO-4

My attorney based our counter-offer for non-pecuniary harm on comps. I discuss how in this video.

To get you started with comps, check out these discrimination cases with non-pecuniary awards over $100K.
https://zagfirm.com/eeoc100.pdf

Punitive damages are available in the private sector, but your chances of getting your employer to agree to them in a settlement aren’t good. But if you’re in the private sector and you can show that your employer failed to act in good faith, you may be able to use the possibility of punitive damages as leverage to get a better settlement on some other front.

Non-monetary relief is another possibility. The soruces I already linked above have info on those as well.

Step 3: Consider what you need to resolve your case

You won’t get everything in a settlement that you might get if you took the case all the way, and won. But of course if you don’t settle, you might end up getting nothing. Looking at the future value of various settlement amounts can help you decide. An online calculator to help you:
https://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/financial/future-value-calculator-basic.php

Consider other factors besides how much… like your level of need right now, and the risk that you could lose court, which depends on how strong your case is, how good your representation is, how your judge does things, and a lot of other factors that we can’t control.

Each person is going to have a different perspective on how to counter-offer. Putting together YOUR counter-offer gives you the opportunity to think about what YOU can accept. And get what YOU need.

---- All opinions are my own. Not LEGAL advice. Just me sharing my perspective as an employee who went through the EEOC claims process & won. I am not an expert at all things EEOC. While I do my best to be factual in my observations, viewers should assume that all observations or statements are ALLEGEDLY. *Never trust your fate to a YouTube content creator. Do your own research, pilot your own vessel. *

--- Background photo on thumb courtesy of searchable NASA Image Library: https://images.nasa.gov/
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