Discrimination Cases

Plaintiff brought claims against Knox County and the County Clerk based on allegedly discriminatory employment practices. The trial court determined that Plaintiff committed serious discovery violations and imposed as a sanction the exclusion of certain evidence. With this evidence excluded, the trial court granted summary judgment to the Defendants. Plaintiff appeals, challenging the discovery sanction, the trial court's conclusion under the Tennessee Human Rights Act that the continuing violation doctrine did not apply, the trial court's conclusion that the Clerk was not individually liable, and the award of attorney's fees against the Plaintiff and her attorney. We affirm.

Summary judgment; Civ.R. 56; evidence; age discrimination; direct evidence; discriminatory intent; prima facie case. The trial court erred in granting summary judgment for employer where employee presented direct evidence of discriminatory intent in his age-discrimination suit. This evidence created a genuine issue of material fact.

Appellant's assignments of error, which challenged the trial court's determination that he failed to exhaust administrative remedies because he did not allege in his charge to the Ohio Civil Rights Commission that he had been constructively discharged, were moot because appellant did not assign as error the trial court's independent determination that his claims of discrimination and retaliation predicated on constructive discharge were time-barred under R.C. 4112.052(C). Trial court's judgment is affirmed on that unchallenged basis.

The language of the Virginia wage theft statute, Code § 40.1-29, specifically lists wages and salaries, but it does not expressly apply to commissions, and its context does not support an interpretation that extends the statute's protections to commissions. Resting its contrary conclusion on the remedial purpose of the statute, past decisions interpreting the term "wages" in other contexts, and an interpretation by an administrative agency contained in a field manual, the Court of Appeals reversed the judgment of the circuit court concluding that Code § 40.1-29 did not apply to commissions. However, neither the plain meaning of the terms "wages" or "commissions," nor the use of the term wages in the context of Code § 40.1-29, suggests that the use of that term sweeps in the concept of "commissions," and contentions to the contrary, while compelling, are properly addressed to the legislature. Therefore, the most plausible reading of Code § 40.1-29 is that the General Assembly did not intend for the wage theft statute to apply to commissions. The judgment of the Court of Appeals is reversed.