Many employees who experience workplace discrimination focus their legal analysis on the discriminatory act itself. The stronger claim is sometimes what happened afterward. Massachusetts General Laws Chapter 151B prohibits employers from retaliating against any person who has opposed a practice made unlawful by the statute or who has filed a charge, testified, or participated in any proceeding under it. That protection is broad, and the legal standard for proving retaliation is in several ways easier to meet than the standard for proving the underlying discrimination.
What Counts as Protected Activity
Protected activity under Chapter 151B includes filing a complaint with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, participating as a witness or party in a MCAD investigation, opposing a discriminatory practice by complaining to HR or management, and requesting a reasonable accommodation for a disability. The activity does not need to be formal or legally perfect to be protected.
An employee who sends an email to their supervisor saying they believe a colleague is being treated differently because of her age has engaged in protected activity, even if the concern later turns out to be unfounded, as long as the complaint was made in good faith. An experienced Boston employment lawyer can evaluate whether a specific communication, complaint, or request constitutes protected activity and whether the employer’s subsequent conduct has the hallmarks of retaliation.
The Causal Link and Why It Is Easier to Establish
Proving discrimination requires showing that the employer acted because of a protected characteristic. Proving retaliation requires showing that the employer acted because of the protected activity. The temporal relationship between the two events is significant evidence in a retaliation case in a way it is not in a pure discrimination case. When an employee complains about discrimination on Monday and is placed on a performance improvement plan on Thursday, the timeline itself raises an inference of retaliation that the employer must explain. Courts in Massachusetts have consistently held that close temporal proximity between protected activity and adverse action is sufficient to establish the causal link at the prima facie stage.
How Retaliation Damages Differ From Discrimination Damages
The damages available in a Chapter 151B retaliation case include lost wages, emotional distress, and attorney fees, the same categories available in a discrimination case. What often makes the retaliation claim more valuable is that it tends to produce cleaner evidence. Discriminatory intent is often circumstantial and contested. Retaliatory intent is often documented directly in the temporal sequence, in performance reviews that appear after a complaint, and in communications that treat the complaining employee differently from peers who did not complain. A jury that finds the retaliation evidence compelling may award substantially higher emotional distress damages than a more ambiguous discrimination case would support.
The 300-Day Clock Runs From Each Retaliatory Act
The MCAD filing deadline applies to retaliation claims as it does to discrimination claims, measured from the date of each discrete retaliatory act rather than from the original discrimination. An employee who was passed over for promotion in retaliation for a complaint they filed eighteen months ago may still have a timely retaliation claim based on the promotion denial even if the original discrimination claim is time-barred. The Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination’s retaliation information describes the protected activities and the standard the Commission applies when evaluating retaliation charges.
