Welcome
“Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” –Abraham Lincoln
Of the hours adults spend during the time they are awake, the largest percentage of their time is devoted to work. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.t01.htm. Unless you are among the 10% of the population who is independently wealthy, work is a necessity, a fact, an inescapable fabric of our lives.
We here at Messing, Rudavsky & Weliky believe that if we’re going to spend so much of our time at work, that time should be fulfilling (or at least not unnecessarily painful). We want to help you remove some of the barriers you may encounter at work that prevent you from achieving that goal. For example, nothing is more antithetical to that goal than working in an environment where your employer sees only the color of your skin, or your gender, or your disability, or your age, or your sexual orientation, rather than your contributions and creativity. Very little in life can be more dehumanizing than this.
Discrimination, of course, is only one of the many ways in which employers construct barriers to achieving success at work. Retaliation, wage theft, contract violations – all are obstacles to success. We want to help you reclaim your workplace from such conditions.
Since we are lawyers, the primary way we can help you is through legal representation and providing you with legal advice. Since the circumstances of every case are unique, we can give legal advice only one-on-one. We can’t provide legal advice through this blog. What we can do, however, is discuss with you the general rules and principles that affect your rights in the workplace, share with you news of developments that affect those rights, and give you our thoughts on what those developments mean. We hope this is useful to you, and we invite you to comment or ask (general) questions if you feel so inclined.
–Jim Weliky, Ellen Messing, Dahlia Rudavsky