Alabama: Worker Establishes Prima Facie Case of Retaliatory Discharge

The Supreme Court of Alabama held it was error for a trial court to grant summary judgment in favor of the employer in a former employee’s retaliatory discharge action where the employee’s evidence indicated that she was fired 20 days after she filed her worker’s compensation claim, that the supervisors who fired her knew about her claim, that one of them expressed a negative attitude about her injured condition, and that the employer violated its own policy in firing her. The former employee alleged that she would have presented evidence, inter alia, that shortly after her work-related accident, her supervisor told her that she might have to find another job.

Thomas A. Robinson, J.D., the Feature National Columnist for the LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation eNewsletter, is the co-author of Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law (LexisNexis).

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance.

See Foster v. North Am. Bus Indus., Inc., 2017 Ala. LEXIS 42 (Apr. 28, 2017)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 104.07.

Source: Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the nation’s leading authority on workers’ compensation law