United States: District Court Says Termination Was Tied to Injury, Not Immigrant Status

Construing Tennessee law, a federal district court held that an employer violated the state’s retaliatory discharge law when it fired an injured worker shortly after an encounter between the worker and two supervisors in which the supervisors berated the worker with profanity and other harsh language (recorded surreptitiously by the worker) for his decision to hire an attorney to handle his injury claim. Quoting Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the court discounted the employer’s preferred excuse — that the worker was an illegal alien and, therefore, ineligible to work in the United States.

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

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance.

See Torres v. Precision Indus., 2020 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 12921 (Jan. 27, 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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