United States: Remoteness of Time Between Claim and Firing Defeats Retaliatory Discharge Action

A federal district court, construing Illinois law, held in relevant part that a plaintiff had failed to make out a prima facie case of retaliatory discharge where her firing occurred some four years after she had filed her workers' compensation claim and where the proferred reason for the firing was the plaintiff's tardiness for work, disruptive behavior, and failure to follow other employer protocols. Plaintiff had initially filed a notice of injury following an incident in which she alleged she had been accidentally stuck with a needle. She contended that she suffered, inter alia, from PTSD because of the worry associated with the needle prick. The employer denied the claim and, according to the appellate court, the plaintiff did not pursue any sort of administrative review. Here, the passage of time between the injury/claim and the firing was crucial to the employer's defense and the primary reason the court dismissed the plaintiff's complaint.

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

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See Strong v. Quest Diagnostics Clinical Labs., 2021 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 19564 (N.D. Ill. Feb. 2, 2020)

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

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

For a more detailed discussion of the case, see

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